How to communicate unit error messages in spreadsheets
Robin Abraham, Martin Erwig · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2005
In previous work we have designed and implemented an automatic reasoning system for spreadsheets, called UCheck, that infers unit information for cells in a spreadsheet. Based on this unit information, UCheck can identify cells in the spreadsheet that contain erroneous formulas. However, the information about an erroneous cell is reported to the user currently in a rather crude way by simply coloring the cell, which does not tell anything about the nature of error and thus offers no help to the user as to how to fix it.In this paper we describe an extension of UCheck, called UFix, which improves the error messages reported to the spreadsheet user dramatically. The approach essentially consists of three steps: First, we identify different categories of spreadsheet errors from an end-user's perspective. Second, we map units that indicate erroneous formulas to these error categories. Finally, we create customized error messages from the unit information and the identified error category. In many cases, these error messages also provide suggestions on how to fix the reported errors.