Spreadsheet applications (such as Microsoft Excel + VBA) are heavily used in a wide range of application domains including engineering, finance, management, statistics and health. However, they do not ensure robustness properties, thus spreadsheet errors are common and potentially costly. According to estimates, the annual cost of spreadsheet errors is around 7 billion dollars. For instance, in 2013, a series of spreadsheet errors at JPMorgan incurred 6 billion dollars trading losses. Yet, expert reports estimate about 90 % of the spreadsheets contain errors.
The MemCAD ERC Starting Grant project opened the way to novel formal analysis techniques for spreadsheet applications. Indeed, while this project focused on the abstraction of data-structures manipulated by programs in order to verify them, spreadsheets occur to be a very interesting case of data-structures, and results of the MemCAD project allowed to better cope with them.
In the SAVES ERC Proof of Concept Grant project, we propose to leverage these results into a toolbox able to safely verify, optimise and maintain spreadsheets, so as to reduce the likelihood of spreadsheet disasters. In the course of the project, we enhanced the state of the toolkit that we started to design during the MemCAD project. In particular, we improved analysis and verification tools and supplemented them with tools to further assist spreadsheet users. This toolbox is commercialised by the startup MatrixLead.
