Just Software: A CEO Diary

This project tries to coop with usual problem of having a spreadsheet when it comes to the company’s uses. A collaboration spreadsheet online embedded in a online operating system (Google OnlineOS) combining both asynchronous and real-time collaboration. Each “sheet” can be shared, from the entire sheet, to individual rows, down to read-only or read-write access. It allows multiple people to edit the same spreadsheet. Oursheet has Excel Import/Export capability. It has XML formats. It has large capacity of row and column. Oursheet supports working with tables. It features formulas with help on the fly fill in formula syntax. Oursheet has chart formatting tools. It ensures a consistent data across your spreadsheets. Oursheet has data analysis and visualization tools. It may share information broadly and securely. Oursheet provides strong system-generated passwords, data encryption 128-bit Verisign SSL certification and 1024-bit RSA public keys to encrypt all data transmissions between your browser and our servers.

Coming at the End of the Summer!!!

Understanding how and where spreadsheets are used in a company and enforcing the required control processes is one of the key requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Businesses rely on spreadsheets to make decisions. Raymond Panko, a professor at the University of Hawaii, shows that over 90% of spreadsheets contain errors of some kind. PricewaterhouseCoopers research demonstrated that 91% of spreadsheets have at least a 5% error margin; KPMG found the same percentage with major errors. Fannie Mae, a US provider of financial products, primarily in the home loan area, had to amend its financial reporting due to spreadsheet errors. The correction increased unrealized gains on securities $1.3 billion. A spreadsheet error caused the National Australia Bank affected US$3 billion. Fidelity’s Magellan fund omitted the minus sign on a net capital loss of $1.3 billion from one spreadsheet and incorrectly treated it as a net capital gain on a separate spreadsheet where additional calculations are done. This meant the dividend estimate spreadsheet was off by $2.6 billion.

Expert System Architecture

The most important modules that make up a rule-based expert system. The user interacts with the system through a user interface which are menus. Then an inference engine is used to reason with both the expert knowledge (extracted from our friendly expert) and data specific to the particular problem being solved. The case specific data includes both data provided by the user and partial conclusions (along with certainty measures) based on this data. In a simple forward chaining rule-based system the case specific data will be the elements in working memory.