For years, business users have leveraged spreadsheets for storing and communicating data. Although spreadsheets may be easy to create and update, making important corporate decisions based on spreadsheets is risky due to the lack of data credibility. Whether you are a manager, developer, end user, or student, this book will help you turn spreadsheet data into credible, useful, reliable data that can be trusted in order to make important decisions.

A chapter is dedicated to each of the following topics:

• Brief history of spreadsheets
• Spreadsheet paradox
• Spreadsheet varieties
• The PDF spreadsheet
• Spreadsheet formatting
• Spreadsheet disambiguation
• The intermediate database
• The ssdef database
• The corporate database
• The metadata database (mnemonic database)
• Political considerations
• Data modeling and the spreadsheet
• Case study