Digital Financial Reporting

The Wired article, Meet the Excel Warriors Saving the World from Spreadsheet Disaster, tells the story of "a quiet battle against illogical formulas, copy-and-paste errors, and structural chaos that cause data carnage."

The article points out,

Research suggests more than 90 per cent of spreadsheets have errors, and half of spreadsheet models used in large businesses have “material defects”. Given some 750 million people use Excel globally, there are plenty of errors needing attention. One prominent researcher calls spreadsheets the dark matter of corporate IT.

A possible solution to many of the problems with spreadsheets is another type of spreadsheet: the deductive spreadsheet a.k.a. the semantic spreadsheet.

Here are a couple of examples: 

• Example 1: (here are the details)
• Example 2: (here are the details)
• Example 3: (here are the details)

OMG is contemplating creating a standard semantic spreadsheet.  What exactly are the advantages? Here are some of the advantages: 

1. Information can be defined using standards.
2. Information is linked together using logic, not presentation artifacts (workbook, row, column, cell).
3. Rules can be separated from spreadsheet information.
4. Standard sets of rules can be used across many spreadsheets.
5. Information is both human-readable and machine-readable.
6. Creators of spreadsheets can maintain control over those spreadsheets.

While presentation-oriented Excel and other such spreadsheets have their place and will likely never go away, semantic spreadsheets also have their place.  In fact, semantic spreadsheets is the foundation upon which computational professional services will be built.

The NOVA program, A to Z: The First Alphabet, points out (minute 16:30 to 17:30) that the first writing in the form of spreadsheets were used to keep ledgers for accountancy to track commerce.  Over 7000 years ago, the need for accounting drove the creation of writing.

Accounting has moved beyond clay tablet spreadsheets to papyrus and then paper spreadsheets.  In the 1970s and 1980s, the electronic spreadsheet was developed.  It is time for the next step in the evolution of the spreadsheet.