Spreadsheet Descriptors

A much better way to understand the meaning of a cell is to look and see what descriptors are to be found on the spreadsheet itself. As a rule, a cell often has a column heading and a row identifier associated with the cell, as shown in Figure 2.7.

There are, however, some basic problems with identifying a cell by its column name and its row identifier. The first problem is that column name and row identification are optional descriptors. The analyst creating the spreadsheet may not have created one or the other (or both!) of these forms of metadata.

But even if the analyst has created both the column name and the row identifier, aligning the two can be a challenge. In a spreadsheet it is easy to access an entire column, thus making the association between the column name and the values in the column obvious. Or it is easy to simply access row of data, thereby making the association between the row identifier and the value of data in the cell obvious...