You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work
Felienne Hermans has done some very interesting work examining how to refactor spreadsheets. (<a href="http://www.felienne.com/publications" rel="nofollow">http://www.felienne.com/publications</a>)<p>Her PhD dissertation on the subject "Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets" (<a href="http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534" rel="nofollow">http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534</a>) is particularly detailed.<p>Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change. Better to figure out how to improve the tooling, rather than undertake the quixotic quest to get business people to abandon their perfectly viable programming tool.<p>There is an excellent video with her on InfoQ, explaining her spreadsheet formula refactoring tool Bumblebee (and the F# code behind it): <a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spreadsheet-refactoring" rel="nofollow">http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spreadsheet-refactoring</a>