Spreadsheet reverse engineering

Spreadsheet applications are very popular end-user programming environments, and many spreadsheet documents are crucial because they keep records of important information, calculation, and analysis. Researchers have discovered, however, that spreadsheets are often error prone, hard to understand, maintain, and reuse. In this thesis work, reverse engineering and visualization techniques are applied to reveal the hidden dependencies between cells and computation units, as well as high-level structural and conceptual abstractions of spreadsheets. A toolkit is developed to ease end-user understanding of spreadsheets by extracting the artifacts and dependencies, analyzing and visualizing the facts, and detecting anomalies. Various evaluation techniques have been used to assess the usability of the tool. In particular, a user study has been conducted to validate the usability and effectiveness of the tool. Results show that our method is very effective in detecting dependencies hidden in spreadsheets, and the tool is easy to learn and use.