It Ain't What You View, But The Way That You View It: documenting spreadsheets with Excelsior, semantic wikis, and literate programming

TL;DR

This paper explores methods for documenting spreadsheets using semantic wikis and literate programming to improve accessibility and comprehensiveness, with preliminary experiments demonstrating potential benefits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining semantic wikis and literate programming for documenting Excelsior spreadsheets, aiming for better usability and structure.

Findings

Preliminary experiments show improved documentation quality.

Semantic wikis facilitate better organization.

Literate programming enhances understanding of spreadsheets.

Abstract

I describe preliminary experiments in documenting Excelsior versions of spreadsheets using semantic wikis and literate programming. The objective is to create well-structured and comprehensive documentation, easy to use by those unfamiliar with the spreadsheets documented. I discuss why so much documentation is hard to use, and briefly explain semantic wikis and literate programming; although parts of the paper are Excelsior-specific, these sections may be of more general interest.