Authors
Zournatzidou Efthalia
Abstract
The personal computers era contributed to passing out advanced programming tasks from the specialized professionals to the end users. Spreadsheet models is one of the most widely used applications worldwide that can produce valuable results with minimal training and effort. The errors however that most spreadsheets include may be catastrophic and difficult to detect.
In this study, we make an investigation on the influence that experience and presentation on the error finding performance by end users. To reach the desired outcome we use a sample of 123 business and finance students that were submitted to a task of finding errors in a simple free cash flow model.
Findings of our research reveal that presentation of the spreadsheet is of major importance as far as the error finding performance is concerned while experience does not seem to affect students on their performance.
The confined pool of the sample, the self reported experience and the necessarily simple spreadsheet (unlike spreadsheets in real world) that we used in our experiment, are the main limitations of our study.
Sample
The experimental free cash flow model was delivered in five distinct forms.
Students were separated in five groups and each group was provided the spreadsheet in one of the five different forms. The purpose of this analysis is to find out which spreadsheet form is more convenient for the subjects to perform best in their error finding task.
The group that worked with "excel with values" form found 56.50 per cent of the 10 total errors seeded in the spreadsheet.
Publication
2015, Master's thesis, Greenwich University, Finance & Financial Information Systems, June
Full article
Spreadsheet error detection performance: An empirical examination in Greece
Also see
Spreadsheet error detection: An empirical examination in the context of Greece
