ExceLint-core is the component functionality for an Excel add-in that automatically finds formula errors in spreadsheets. It is a product of research from the PLASMA lab @ UMass Amherst and Microsoft Research. The add-in itself is available here: ExceLint add-in.

ExceLint was originally created by Dan Barowy (Williams College), Emery Berger (UMass Amherst / Microsoft Research), and Ben Zorn (Microsoft Research).

Building

The commands below will build ExceLint-core on Unix-like systems. Note that this requires a recent version of node.

npm install
npm install typescript
# below not needed for Mac
sudo apt install node-typescript
npm run build

To install an up-to-date version of node on Linux:

npm install --update node

To install an up-to-date version of node on Mac OS X with Homebrew:

brew uninstall --force --ignore-dependencies node npm
brew install node npm

Testing

ExceLint comes with a range of test inputs. The simplest sanity check is to run on a single spreadsheet included in the distribution.

node build/src/cli/excelint-cli.js --input test/act3_lab23_posey.xlsx

We manually audited a number of spreadsheets (from the "CUSTODES" suite); this annotations file is included in the test directory. When ExceLint can find it, excelint-cli.js will automatically use this data.

cd test
node ../build/src/cli/excelint-cli.js --directory subjects_xlsx

Technical Details

The following technical paper describes how ExceLint works and includes an extensive empirical evaluation: ExceLint: Automatically Finding Spreadsheet Formula Errors, Daniel W. Barowy (Williams College), Emery D. Berger (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Benjamin Zorn (Microsoft Research). In Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 2, Number OOPSLA.

Development

ExceLint-core is written entirely in TypeScript.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CCF-1617892. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.