Can people recomend ways to test Excel Spreadsheets?

Question

I'm not talking about the simple ones here, but the Spreadsheets which sprout arms and legs and start walking about and having a life of their own.

They will always exist.

Can people suggest controls that they've put in spreadsheets to catch errors that they've found effective? I've used VBAUnit in the past which is a bit hacky but seemed to do the trick, but I'm concentrating here on 'pure' spreadsheets with no VBA.

Also does anyone have suggestions on how to test excel addins such as generated by Excel-DNA

Answer 1

I believe a scripting language (like Perl) would enable you to parse an XLS for certain data, if you knew what you were looking for.

Never done it myself though...