Enron versus EUSES: A Comparison of Two Spreadsheet Corpora

TL;DR

This study compares two large datasets of business spreadsheets, Enron and EUSES, revealing their similarities in size, complexity, and structure, and providing insights into spreadsheet use in corporate environments.

Contribution

It offers a detailed comparison of Enron and EUSES spreadsheet corpora, enhancing understanding of spreadsheet characteristics in corporate contexts and validating the EUSES dataset's representativeness.

Findings

Most spreadsheets are small with simple formulas.

EUSES and Enron spreadsheets have similar structural characteristics.

Spreadsheets generally exhibit low coupling and complexity.

Abstract

Spreadsheets are widely used within companies and often form the basis for business decisions. Numerous cases are known where incorrect information in spreadsheets has lead to incorrect decisions. Such cases underline the relevance of research on the professional use of spreadsheets. Recently a new dataset became available for research, containing over 15.000 business spreadsheets that were extracted from the Enron E-mail Archive. With this dataset, we 1) aim to obtain a thorough understanding of the characteristics of spreadsheets used within companies, and 2) compare the characteristics of the Enron spreadsheets with the EUSES corpus which is the existing state of the art set of spreadsheets that is frequently used in spreadsheet studies. Our analysis shows that 1) the majority of spreadsheets are not large in terms of worksheets and formulas, do not have a high degree of coupling, and their formulas are relatively simple; 2) the spreadsheets from the EUSES corpus are, with respect to the measured characteristics, quite similar to the Enron spreadsheets.