On Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th of July, TU Delft will host the Annual gathering of the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group – EuSpRIG – (“yew-sprig”). The conference will consist of two days of spreadsheets galore. International keynotes, interesting talks, in-depth hands-on sessions and intriguing discussions will be on the program. And you can be too.

If you want to present your take on spreadsheets and spreadsheet risk, you can! The call for sessions is now open.

The intended audience of our conference are professionals that encounter spreadsheets in their daily work. The analyst who builds large models in spreadsheets but sometimes struggles to maintain them, the auditor that wonders if they are correct, and the CFO that would like to move to a BI solution but does not know how the spreadsheets fit in.

We invite both researchers and practitioners in the field of spreadsheets to send us the outline for a 45 minute talk. On maximum three pages with a maximum of 1000 words, tell us what you want to present.

Topics of your talk could be: Note that the conference is not limited to these topics. If you are in doubt if your idea is a good fit, feel free to contact me.

• testing and quality assurance of spreadsheets
• best practices for spreadsheet design
• improving spreadsheet productivity
• approaches for spreadsheet education (both in schools/universities as for professionals)
• auditing of spreadsheets
• version control of spreadsheets
• graphs, charts and data visualization
• replacement, migration and improvement strategies
• coping with big sets of spreadsheets: discovery, dependencies and usage monitoring
• understanding and documenting existing spreadsheets
• organisational experiences with enterprise policies
• human & psychological factors including change management, assumptions, abstraction, interpretation, denial, overconfidence, culture, behaviour, attitudes, fraud & human resource management
• extension technologies – PowerPivot, VBA, ADO, Excel Services, BI and Web-enabling

Regardless of the topic, we invite two types of talks. Either your talk is a technology talk or your talk is an experience talk.

1. Technology talks present a certain spreadsheets method or tool, like a set of guidelines for spreadsheet design or a reverse engineering tool. In such a talk, you present the need for this method, details on how it works and the benefits.
2. Experience talks share your history with a certain spreadsheet or spreadsheet problem. You talk for instance about how you managed to roll out a design methodology at your company or how you migrated all your customers spreadsheets to Excel 2010.

Of course, there is some overlap, an experience talk will introduce technologies and a technology talk might share experiences. Still, we ask you to pick on upon submission.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line at felienne at @gmail dot com

The tiny print

• Submission deadline for sessions: February 28th
• Acceptance notice: March 31th
• Full program online: April 2rd
• Conference July 3rd and 4th