Dimension Inference in Spreadsheets

The authors present a reasoning system for inferring dimension information in spreadsheets. This system can be used to check the consistency of spreadsheet formulas and can be employed to detect errors in spreadsheets. They have prototypically implemented the system as an add-in to Excel. In an evaluation of this implementation the authors were able to detect dimension errors in almost 50% of the investigated spreadsheets, which shows that the system works reliably in practice and that dimension information can be well exploited to uncover errors in spreadsheets.