How Are Spreadsheet Templates Used in Practice - A Case Study on Enron

Sep 12, 2026

Spreadsheet templates reduce the effort of creating similar spreadsheets by providing predefined table layouts, headers, styles, and formulas. When no dedicated templates exist, users may copy an existing spreadsheet as an instance template, but poor design or misuse can cause errors that propagate to all derived instances. An empirical study analyzes 47 predesigned templates (490 instances) and 21 instance template groups (168 pairs) from the Enron corpus, identifying practical design and usage issues and suggesting research directions.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryForms

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time2 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Motivation and benefits of templates

Problems from design flaws and error propagation

Issues from incorrect template usage

Study overview and research directions

How Are Spreadsheet Templates Used in Practice: A Case Study on Enron Liang Xu, Wensheng Dou*, Jiaxin Zhu, Chushu Gao, Jun Wei, Tao Huang University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China {xuliang12, wsdou, zhujiaxin, gaochushu, wj, [tao}@otcaix.iscas.ac.cn](tao}@otcaix.iscas.ac.cn) ABSTRACT To reduce the effort of creating similar spreadsheets, end users may create expected spreadsheets from some predesigned templates, which contain necessary table layouts (e.g., headersand styles) and formulas, other than from scratch. When there are no explicitly predesigned spreadsheet templates, end users often take an existing spreadsheet as the instance template to create anew spreadsheet. However, improper template design and usage can introduce various issues. For example, a formula error in the template can be easily propagated to all its instances without users’noticing. Since template design and usage are rarely documented in literature and practice, practitioners and researchers lack understanding of them to achieve effective improvement. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the design and the usage of spreadsheet templates based on 47 predesigned templates (490 instances in total), and 21 instance template groups (168 template and instance pairs in total), extracted from the Enron corpus. Our study reveals a number of spreadsheet template design and usage issues in practice, and also sheds lights on several interesting research directions. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Spreadsheets • Software and its engineering → Software reverse engineering KEYWORDS Spreadsheet, template, empirical study ACM Reference format: Liang Xu, Wensheng Dou, Jiaxin Zhu, Chushu Gao, Jun Wei and Tao Huang. 2018. How Are Spreadsheet Templates Used in Practice: A Case Study on Enron. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engi-neering (ESEC/FSE’18), November 4–9, 2018, Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264834](https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264834) *Corresponding author Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions [from Permissions@acm.org](from Permissions@acm.org). ESEC/FSE '18, November 4–9, 2018, Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5573-5/18/11…$15.00 [https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264834](https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264834) (a) Blank (Template) (b) 10-3 (Instance) Figure 1. A real-world template and one of its instances. 1 INTRODUCTION Spreadsheets, as one of the most successful end-user programming platforms, are widely used to perform various tasks, such as financial reporting, data storage and data analyses [20] . End users usually develop a group of similar spreadsheets to perform similar business tasks. For example, the monthly financial reports in a company usually share the same table structures and computations. To speed up the preparation of such similar spreadsheets, end users may prepare semi-finished spreadsheets with some predefined formulas and table layouts, and then create new spreadsheets based on these semi-finished spreadsheets. In this paper, we use predesigned templates to denote this kind of semi-finished spreadsheets, and instances to denote the spreadsheets created bas

FAQs

How do spreadsheet templates help end users in practice?

They provide predefined table layouts and formulas, which reduce the effort of creating new spreadsheets and keep a consistent structure across instances.

What risks arise from using poorly designed spreadsheet templates?

Design flaws or formula errors in a template can be propagated to all instances derived from it without users noticing.

How can incorrect template usage introduce additional spreadsheet errors?

Users may unintentionally delete or alter formulas in the instance template’s derived spreadsheet, making the spreadsheet error-prone.

Sep 12, 2026

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