It has been known for some time that understanding the content of spreadsheet software used by many enterprises and organizations and discovering errors in that content is a difficult task. In particular, it is known that it takes time to create a spreadsheet, and many errors are included in the spreadsheet due to mistakes of the creator. In response to this problem, we have developed a financial information description language and associated visualization and analysis tools to facilitate the understanding of inter-element structure and simplify various types of analyses. A key feature of this development is clear separation between the input of formulas and numerical values and the output of calculation results and between operators and operands in formulas. The financial information description language describes input information such as item values and relationships in a simple format that enumerates the name, operators, and operands of each item. The visualization and analysis tools, meanwhile, perform calculations and output results in table or graph form. In a comparison experiment performed with conventional spreadsheet software, the proposed method can efficiently create a calculation sheet in a short time and has the effect of reducing errors.
Similarly, FDL REF is a description language for spreadsheets, which is empowered with visualization and analysis tool for constructing the separation between the input of formulas and the output of calculation results.