Supporting Professional Spreadsheet Users by Generating Leveled Dataflow Diagrams

Thanks to their flexibility and intuitive programming model, spreadsheets are widely used in industry, often for business-critical applications. Similar to software developers, pro-fessional spreadsheet users demand support for maintaining and transferring their spreadsheets. In this paper, we first study the problems and informa-tion needs of professional spreadsheet users by means of a survey conducted at a large financial company. Based on these needs, we then present an approach that extracts this information from spreadsheets and presents it in a com-pact and easy to understand way, using leveled dataflow diagrams. Our approach comes with three different views on the dataflow and allows the user to analyze the dataflow diagrams in a top-down fashion also using slicing techniques