一句话：首个基于 Enron 语料的电子表格模板设计与使用实证研究，揭示实践中的多类问题并指出研究方向。
为减少创建相似电子表格的工作量，终端用户常基于预设计模板生成新表，或直接以已有表格作为实例模板；但模板设计与使用不当会引入问题，例如模板中的公式错误会在用户毫无察觉的情况下传播到所有实例。由于模板的设计与使用在文献与实践中鲜有记录，研究者与从业者对其缺乏理解。本文从 Enron 语料中提取 47 个预设计模板（共 490 个实例）和 21 组实例模板（共 168 对模板—实例对），首次对电子表格模板的设计与使用开展实证研究。研究揭示了实践中存在的多类模板设计与使用问题，并为后续研究指出若干值得探索的方向。
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., headers and 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 a new 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.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot4670,
title = {How are spreadsheet templates used in practice: a case study on Enron},
author = {Liang Xu and Wensheng Dou and Jiaxin Zhu and Chushu Gao and Jun Wei and Tao Huang},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.1145/3236024.3264834}
}