Spreadsheets are widely used within companies and often form the basis for business decisions. Numerous cases are known where incorrect information in spreadsheets has lead to incorrect decisions. Such cases underline the relevance of research on the professional use of spreadsheets. Recently a new dataset became available for research, containing over 15.000 business spreadsheets that were extracted from the Enron E-mail Archive. With this dataset, we 1) aim to obtain a thorough understanding of the characteristics of spreadsheets used within companies, and 2) compare the characteristics of the Enron spreadsheets with the EUSES corpus which is the existing state of the art set of spreadsheets that is frequently used in spreadsheet studies. Our analysis shows that 1) the majority of spreadsheets are not large in terms of worksheets and formulas, do not have a high degree of coupling, and their formulas are relatively simple; 2) the spreadsheets from the EUSES corpus are, with respect to the measured characteristics, quite similar to the Enron spreadsheets.
Most related to our efforts is of course the work of Hermans and Murphy-Hill @cite_10 which initially presented the Enron spreadsheet corpus. The authors performed a preliminary analysis of some basic characteristics (like number of worksheets, cells, and formulas) of these spreadsheets. While Hermans and Murphy-Hill present a first overview of the spreadsheets, we, in this paper, dive deeper and added additional metrics to measure the degree of coupling and gain more insight in the actual use of functions. Also, for every metric we compared the Enron spreadsheets with the EUSES corpus. By using the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test and calculating the Cliff's delta for the different metrics we answer the question of representativeness of the EUSES corpus.
@cite_10
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Spreadsheets are used extensively in business processes around the world and as such, a topic of research interest. Over the past few years, many spreadsheet studies have been performed on the EUSES spreadsheet corpus. While this corpus has served the spreadsheet community well, the spreadsheets it contains are mainly gathered with search engines and as such do not represent spreadsheets used in companies. This paper presents a new dataset, extracted for the Enron Email Archive, containing over 15,000 spreadsheets used within the Enron Corporation. In addition to the spreadsheets, we also present an analysis of the associated emails, where we look into spreadsheet specific email behavior. Our analysis shows that 1) 24 of Enron spreadsheets with at least one formula contain an Excel error, 2) there is little diversity in the functions used in spreadsheets: 76 of spreadsheets in the presented corpus only use the same 15 functions and, 3) the spreadsheets are substantially more smelly than the EUSES corpus, especially in terms of long calculation chains. Regarding the emails, we observe that spreadsheets 1) are a frequent topic of email conversation with 10 of emails either sending or referring spreadsheets and 2) the emails are frequently discussing errors in and updates to spreadsheets.