Get your spreadsheets under (version) control

Abstract

Spreadsheets play a pivotal role in many organizations. They serve to store and manipulate data or forecasting, and they are often used to help in the decision process, thus directly impacting the success, or not, of organizations. As the research community already realized, spreadsheets tend to have the same problems “professional” software contain. Thus, in the past decade many software engineering techniques have been successfully proposed to aid spreadsheet developers and users. However, one of the most used mechanisms to manage software projects is still lacking in spreadsheets: a version control system. A version control system allows for collaborative development, while also allowing individual developers to explore different alternatives without compromising the main project. In this paper we present a version control system, named SheetGit, oriented for end-user programmers. It allows to graphically visualize the history of versions (including branches), to switch between different versions just by pointing and clicking, and to visualize the differences between any two versions in an animated way. To validate our approach/tool we performed an empirical evaluation which shows evidence that SheetGit can aid users when compared to other tools.