Risk Management for Complex Calculations: EuSpRIG Best Practices in Hybrid Applications

TL;DR

This paper advocates for integrating spreadsheets with advanced mathematical tools like MatLab to create hybrid applications, applying EuSpRIG best practices to reduce errors and improve development efficiency.

Contribution

It extends EuSpRIG best practices to hybrid Excel/MatLab applications, providing guidelines to mitigate risks in complex calculations.

Findings

Hybrid applications can reduce error potential.

Applying best practices shortens development time.

Hybrid approach enables higher-level mathematical operations.

Abstract

As the need for advanced, interactive mathematical models has increased, user/programmers are increasingly choosing the MatLab scripting language over spreadsheets. However, applications developed in these tools have high error risk, and no best practices exist. We recommend that advanced, highly mathematical applications incorporate these tools with spreadsheets into hybrid applications, where developers can apply EuSpRIG best practices. Development of hybrid applications can reduce the potential for errors, shorten development time, and enable higher level operations. We believe that hybrid applications are the future and over the course of this paper, we apply and extend spreadsheet best practices to reduce or prevent risks in hybrid Excel/MatLab applications.