> Spreadsheet formulas can refer to rectangular ranges of arbitrary size. When a user changes the structure of a referenced table, the spreadsheet system updates the references to refer to a new range. Unfortunately, this new range may differ from the user's expectations, introducing bugs in spreadsheets. We describe a user study showing that standard reference semantics are error-prone

Yeah. It's a pet-peeve of mine: after having been tasked to port a spreadsheet to a dedicated app, I've lost all illusions about spreadsheets.

Or, put it like this: spreadsheets are for programmers. When a non-programmer uses a spreadsheet, it's full, full, full of broken assumptions.

The famous Excel vid by Joel Spolsky shows just that: it's ultra-powerful stuff, but you basically have to be a programmer to understand what's doable and how to use that power wisely (and Joel Spolsky is a programmer himself).

Users don't understand dates and the relation between values and the values at a certain date or the values at the date of encoding or the values when they're automatically fetched, for a start.

Then they have absolutely zero clue as how to model things crossing boundaries: for example something crossing a year boundary.

I could go on and on but it's just mind-boggling. Reunions discussing the spreadsheet with "the users" and asking questions and they're just lost: they don't get it. They don't understand what they've done. It's confusion everywhere (in their minds and in their spreadsheets).

The corporate world runs on Powerpoint presentation using bogus numbers from broken spreadsheets.

Now it's nice to see a system that tries to add some sanity to spreadsheets but I fear it's like "SVN trying to be CVS done right, but it's impossible to do CVS right" (paraphrasing Torvalds).

P.S: do I use spreadsheets? You bet I do, I'm a programmer.

Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System