Cognitive Logical Reasoning Skill and the Relationship to Spreadsheet Data Quality

Electronic spreadsheets have made a major contribution to financial analysis and problem solving. Spreadsheets were the first software packages produced for serious business use, and their introduction marked a new era of end-user orientation of computers (Chan 1987). Spreadsheets are used extensively today in accounting and business applications. Although many decisions are based on the analysis of a spreadsheet model, it has been documented that there are often data quality problems, i.e. underlying formulas and resulting numbers are frequently wrong. A growing body of evidence indicates that these errors in spreadsheets are a pervasive problem