• Corpus ID: 23584639

User Defined Spreadsheet Functions in Excel

@article{Tyszkiewicz2012UserDS,
  title={User Defined Spreadsheet Functions in Excel},
  author={Jerzy Tyszkiewicz and Dermot Balson},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2012},
  volume={abs/1211.6781}
}

• J. Tyszkiewicz, Dermot Balson
• Published 28 November 2012
• Computer Science
• ArXiv

Creating user defined functions (UDFs) is a powerful method to improve the quality of computer applications, in particular spreadsheets. However, the only direct way to use UDFs in spreadsheets is to switch from the functional and declarative style of spreadsheet formulas to the imperative VBA, which creates a high entry barrier even for proficient spreadsheet users. It has been proposed to extend Excel by UDFs declared by a spreadsheet: user defined spreadsheet functions (UDSFs). In this paper we present a method to create a limited form of UDSFs in Excel without any use of VBA. Calls to those UDSFs utilize what-if data tables to execute the same part of a worksheet several times, thus turning it into a reusable function definition.