Extending the boundary of spreadsheet programming: Lessons learned from Chinese governmental projects

Abstract

Spreadsheet is one of the most commonly used end user programming environments. As such, there has been significant effort made by researchers and the industry to develop techniques and tools to improve spreadsheets. In the course of developing spreadsheet-based applications in Chinese governmental projects, we found that enabling end-user to program on the all-in-one, hard-to-validate Chinese spreadsheet is a very challenging task. To do so, we construct system on MS Excel, and provide additional, yet customized, script language for end-user programming.