What ethical issues should you consider while creating a gra

Solution

Microsoft Excel is frequently used to create spreadsheets for sensitive legal and business documents such as business plans, contracts and financial information. Because these documents can expose businesses to legal and ethical liability, it is important to incorporate ethical considerations into spreadsheet design. Data Display Excel creates spreadsheets and graphs that make sense of large amounts of numerical data. However, it offers tools that can bury negative data trends through the use of obfuscation in the choice of what data is presented obviously. Columns and rows of the spreadsheet can be hidden, allowing data to be included for distribution but not obvious to the reader. Also, skilled creators of graphs can use variation in axis measurements, labels or choice of graphs to minimize financial issues in charts and other data displays. Ethical developers of Excel spreadsheets avoid these techniques to prevent confusion in the readers; the ethical approach is to display the positive along with the negative and allow spreadsheet readers to draw their own conclusions. Calculation Errors and Misdirection Excel includes powerful mathematical formulas to display trends and regressions from large data sets. These formulas can become extremely complex, and by default an Excel formula is not easy to read. The reader of a spreadsheet generally trusts the author to complete spreadsheet calculations accurately. An unethical Excel practice is to allow calculation errors to go unfixed if their displayed results are more favorable, or to deliberately hide such errors in calculations deep within formulas to make them difficult to find. Ethical practices require fixing all mathematical errors as they are discovered, and naming cell ranges in Excel so that formulas are as easy to read as possible by all people using the spreadsheet. Malware Excel includes the Visual Basic for Applications programming language, which is used to create macros. Macros are scripts which generate cell data in the spreadsheet. The VBA language allows for the creation of viruses and other malware that can be embedded within a spreadsheet, and can then spread to other Microsoft Office documents. It is highly unethical to deliberately include such software in any spreadsheet, and any company that deliberately or unwittingly transmits any document with VBA malware may expose itself to legal liability and lawsuits by the recipients. Security and Encryption Many Excel spreadsheets contain sensitive data that cannot be exposed even within a particular company, let alone to business colleagues and competitors. Consider the business implications if a spreadsheet containing corporate salary data is widely distributed within a company, which can be as easy as hitting \"Reply All\" to the wrong email message. Excel spreadsheets, along with any other documents containing secret information, should be stored using encryption and strong passwords, and transmitted to other people with the greatest of care.