Old Excel Add-Ins from ACBA

In the first decade of this millennium I developed two significant add-ins for Excel, that guided my approach to the structure of Excel workbooks (ACBA-EWP.xlam) and the review of those workbooks for errors etc (ACBA-Tools.xlam). The software can be downloaded from the links.

Diets would be boring if they never changed.

The Electronic Working Papers software assumes that workbooks do NOT stay static in terms of their structure. Rather they change and develop over time. It provides a methodology within which the changes and development can be managed. The reference to working papers is designed to show the rationale for that development. More detail about about operational mechanics of the software are available at ACBA Electronic Working Papers.

It is almost inevitable that Excel workbooks developed over time will become corrupted and error prone. The ACBA Tools software provides a series of simple tools that allows the user to review individual worksheets for their formulae, numeric values, error values etc. Also for worksheets developed over time, it allows the user to compare worksheets in terms of the changes between them. This functionality is considered in more detail at ACBA Audit Tools.

Comments

Cell Maps - Critical Comments

Cell maps are intended as tools for reviewing spreadsheets. If you spot an error or an inconsistency in the cell map this should be recorded and, if practicable, corrected. The cell mapping software provides a method for recording a reviewer's comments. All comments are linked to a specific map (or data table), The comments for a workbook under review are collated in a single worksheet. In this case, there's just one comment. The comment above refers to the area highlighted towards the bottom of the map below and are hyperlinked.to the specific area of the map through the column headed 'Map/Source Link'. The top left cell the source range provides a link back to the 'Comments. worksheet'. The yellow cells suggest that users should be entering information for collection by a formula, but which one. At the this point I went back to the orginal worksheet and traced the dependents for some of these 'so called' user entry cells - also coloured yellow as it ...

ACBA Mapping: Employing ‘UsedRange’ in Excel

When reviewing a worksheet the ACBA Mapping software uses VBA’s ‘UsedRange’ function to identify the full scope of the sheet. This function is excellent for identifying separate ranges employed in a worksheet, but has some drawbacks. One of these drawbacks has been identified while reviewing the Enron corpus of files ( https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Enron_Spreadsheets_and_Emails/1221767 ) The Enron corpus of spreadsheets and other correspondence is huge. Felienne Hermans however has whittled the number of workbooks down to 16,189 unique items. https://www.felienne.com/archives/3634 The workbook that clearly displayed the UsedRange issue is named ‘benjamin_rogers__938__historical outages.xlsx’. Clearly the files have been renamed to prevent duplicates. In this blog though I will refer to it as ‘Historical Outages’. In the original Mapping software, users were advised when the ‘UsedRange’ exceeded half a million cells. This allows the user to escape from the proc...

Big Brother at a Distance

We know that our spreadsheets should be functional and error free, but there is a tension between how we review a spreadsheet to ensure that it is correct and the functionality of the spreadsheet itself. None of us like Big Brother breathing down our necks too closely. In What is a Cell Map? I discussed the creation of a simplified version of a spreadsheet to aid review and error trapping. However, the map is itself a spreadsheet. If you created maps for each worksheet in your workbook, the workbook would quickly bloat and become unmanageable. The obvious answer is to post your maps somewhere else, but clearly linked to primary workbook. The ACBA-Mapping package does just that. It generates a separate Map Book to hold all the spreadsheet maps (and other analyses) associated with the parent workbook. The parent workbook has a new worksheet that maintains a summary of all the detailed analyses generated for the workbook. This new worksheet is called 'DataList_and_MappingC...

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