A Structured Approach to the development of Solutions in Excel

Abstract

Spreadsheets offer a supremely successful democratisation platform, placing the manipulation and presentation of numbers within the grasp of users that have little or no mathematical expertise or IT experience. What appears to be almost completely lacking within a "normal" solution built using Excel default settings is the deployment of any structure that extends beyond a single-cell formula. The structural elements that allow conventional code to scale without escalating errors appear to be absent. This paper considers the use of controversial or lesser-used techniques to create a coherent solution strategy in which the problem is solved by a sequence of formulas resembling the steps of a programmed language.