As Microsoft indicated in their guidance paper "Strategies for Addressing Spreadsheet Compliance Challenges", spreadsheets are an enterprise software resource, and so are as much under regulation as mainline data processing systems. However, because most see spreadsheets as a tactical, custom tool, often end-users and organisations do...
Quick quiz: Who was the first agency to raise concerns about the use of spreadsheets in environments where controlled documents are required? The banking industry? A Financial Industry regulator? Sen. Paul Sarbanes and Rep. Mike Oxley? No, it was the UK VAT authorities (HMCE) and the Food...
We are delighted to to be able to bring you information about the Spreadsheet Safe Diagnostic Assessment Tool this morning. With assesment items drawn from across the programme Syllabus, the Spreadsheet Safe Diagnostic Assessment tool allows you to see at first hand how you rate in...
We had very a very useful and informative Spreadsheet Safe Breakfast Briefing event at the Code Institute on Dublin’s St Stephens Green on Tuesday morning this week. First of all, thank you to our friends at Code Institute who kindly made their excellent technical facility (complete...
It’s that time of year, and for many the priority is working hard to finalise next year’s budget. Or indeed you may thankfully have completed this process by now. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning a major accounting error discovered in the 2016 Fort Saskatchewan city budget which...
If I may, I would like to share with you some thoughts that come to mind as I celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the start of my formal training in Computer Science at Brunel University, West London in October 1976. I was a precocious young man...
Halloween beckons shortly, and perhaps it’s time for some spreadsheet horror stories! And in this US election year, especially ones with an election flavour. The EuSpRIG horror stories web page can be found at: http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm and contains two reports on voting miscounts, and three more in their...
It’s Annual Budget time this week in Ireland, and much drama and pageantry is played out. In many ways a budget from government is an exercise in managing expectations. The same is true perhaps in a practical sense with spreadsheets. “How is that result arrived at?”...
At first glance, they may seem pretty unremarkable – who pays attention to spreadsheet file properties? It’s noteworthy that the Spreadsheet Safe training and certification programme suggests they have quite a level of importance. Let’s see why: At a software level, MS show them on the...
The term ‘version’ refers to a particular state or stage of design in the development of an application. A ‘release’ is a version that has been issued (released) for use. In the spreadsheet world, these distinctions are largely blurred because there is not the same...