Spreadsheet development and ‘what-if’ analysis: quantitative versus qualitative errors

Past research has shown that errors are relatively common in all types of spreadsheets. As spreadsheets are used widely by executives in analyzing and supporting their decision making, especially in financial analysis, budgeting and forecasting applications, it is important for spreadsheets to be accurate. Errors undetected in spreadsheets may have undesirable consequences. For example, errors may adversely impact the firm’s competitiveness or profitability when the costing of projects is prone to incorrect computation. For this purpose, we investigate the types of errors that may occur even for simple domain-free spreadsheet problems. In addition, we also show that spreadsheet errors are difficult to detect during ‘what-if’ analysis (i.e. when some design parameters are changed) when spreadsheets are not properly designed. The results show that most students do not take due care in designing spreadsheets. It appears that the techniques in teaching spreadsheets should really focus on how to design a comprehensive spreadsheet that is both easy to maintain and debug rather than just demonstrating the many features of spreadsheets. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.