Audit and Change Analysis of Spreadsheets

TL;DR

This paper introduces tools for auditing and controlling access in spreadsheets, addressing verification challenges in multi-author environments by adapting software engineering techniques to ensure data integrity and security.

Contribution

It presents novel tools for auditing changes and controlling access in spreadsheets, enhancing verification and security in collaborative environments.

Findings

Tools enable tracking of cell changes, including who made them.

Access control mechanisms improve trustworthiness of spreadsheet data.

Applicable to OpenOffice.org Calc and compatible with Excel.

Abstract

Because spreadsheets have a large and growing importance in real-world work, their contents need to be controlled and validated. Generally spreadsheets have been difficult to verify, since data and executable information are stored together. Spreadsheet applications with multiple authors are especially difficult to verify, since controls over access are difficult to enforce. Facing similar problems, traditional software engineering has developed numerous tools and methodologies to control, verify and audit large applications with multiple developers. We present some tools we have developed to enable 1) the audit of selected, filtered, or all changes in a spreadsheet, that is, when a cell was changed, its original and new contents and who made the change, and 2) control of access to the spreadsheet file(s) so that auditing is trustworthy. Our tools apply to OpenOffice.org calc spreadsheets, which can generally be exchanged with Microsoft Excel.