> Spreadsheet formulas can refer to rectangular ranges of arbitrary size. When a user changes the structure of a referenced table, the spreadsheet system updates the references to refer to a new range. Unfortunately, this new range may differ from the user's expectations, introducing bugs in spreadsheets. We describe a user study showing that standard reference semantics are error-prone<p>Yeah. It's a pet-peeve of mine: after having been tasked to port a spreadsheet to a dedicated app, I've lost all illusions about spreadsheets.<p>Or, put it like this: spreadsheets are for programmers. When a non-programmer uses a spreadsheet, it's full, full, full of broken assumptions.<p>The famous Excel vid by Joel Spolsky shows just that: it's ultra-powerful stuff, but you basically have to be a programmer to understand what's doable and how to use that power wisely (and Joel Spolsky is a programmer himself).<p>Users don't understand dates and the relation between values and the values at a certain date or the values at the date of encoding or the values when they're automatically fetched, for a start.<p>Then they have absolutely zero clue as how to model things crossing boundaries: for example something crossing a year boundary.<p>I could go on and on but it's just mind-boggling. Reunions discussing the spreadsheet with "the users" and asking questions and they're just lost: they don't get it. They don't understand what they've done. It's confusion everywhere (in their minds and in their spreadsheets).<p>The corporate world runs on Powerpoint presentation using bogus numbers from broken spreadsheets.<p>Now it's nice to see a system that tries to add <i>some</i> sanity to spreadsheets but I fear it's like "SVN trying to be CVS done right, but it's impossible to do CVS right" (paraphrasing Torvalds).<p>P.S: do I use spreadsheets? You bet I do, I'm a programmer.