INTRODUCING CONDITIONAL ARRAY FORMULAS IN SPREADSHEET CLASSES
Mária Csernoch · University of Debrecen Electronic Archive (University of Debrecen) · 2012
Reasons for spreadsheet-errors are many folded. One of the main reasons for these errors that spreadsheet applications are mainly designed for end-users who are not specified in programming, however companies issuing the newer and newer versions of their programs tend not to take into consideration this fact. Instead of making these applications more “end-user-safe”, they introduce novel functions with names and lists of arguments which cause difficulties for the non-professional end-users to apply. The other problem with these sprouting new functions is that they are not necessarily compatible with their predecessors. One of the categories of functions which keeps growing in size is the set of the built-in conditional functions. However, substituting these functions with conditional single-result array formulas would make the introduction of new functions unnecessary, would increase the end-users’ confidence, less their uncertainty, and consequently, their errors, and last but not least they are proved to be extremely flexible. The method of introducing these array formulas was tested on high school and university students. Results clearly indicate that the method is easily applicable and a remarkable improvement was detected in the work of the students