Reproduce “Toward Reverse Engineering of VBA Based Excel Spreadsheet Applications” on OpenResearch
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About this paper
Domenico Amalfitano, Nicola Amatucci, Vincenzo De Simone, Anna Rita Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana
Researchers from the University of Naples Federico II developed reverse engineering techniques and the EXACT open-source tool to reconstruct conceptual data and business logic models from VBA-based Excel applications. This approach helps in comprehending and managing complex, often undocumented, spreadsheet systems by abstracting their underlying design.
Key insights
- It is feasible to reconstruct both conceptual data models and business logic models from complex, often undocumented, VBA-based Excel applications.
- Heuristic rules can effectively infer data structures, relationships, and attributes by analyzing visual and textual patterns within spreadsheet cells and their arrangement.
- Static analysis of VBA source code, combined with programmatic access to the Excel Object Model, allows for the comprehensive extraction and visualization of application components and their critical inter-relationships, such as procedure calls and cell dependencies.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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