How are spreadsheet templates used in practice: a case study on Enron

Abstract

To reduce the effort of creating similar spreadsheets, end users may create expected spreadsheets from some predesigned templates, which contain necessary table layouts (e.g., headers and styles) and formulas, other than from scratch. When there are no explicitly predesigned spreadsheet templates, end users often take an existing spreadsheet as the instance template to create a new spreadsheet. However, improper template design and usage can introduce various issues. For example, a formula error in the template can be easily propagated to all its instances without users’ noticing. Since template design and usage are rarely documented in literature and practice, practitioners and researchers lack understanding of them to achieve effective improvement. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the design and the usage of spreadsheet templates based on 47 predesigned templates (490 instances in total), and 21 instance template groups (168 template and instance pairs in total), extracted from the Enron corpus. Our study reveals a number of spreadsheet template design and usage issues in practice, and also sheds lights on several interesting research directions.