  Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, heavily relied on throughout vast swathes of
finance, commerce, industry, academia and Government. They are also
acknowledged to be extraordinarily and unacceptably prone to error. If these
two points are accepted, it has to follow that their uncontrolled use has the
potential to inflict considerable damage. One approach to controlling such
error should be to define as "good practice" a set of characteristics that a
spreadsheet must possess and as "bad practice" another set that it must avoid.
Defining such characteristics should, in principle, perfectly do-able. However,
being able to say with authority at a definite moment that any particular
spreadsheet complies with these characteristics is very much more difficult.
The author asserts that the use of automated spreadsheet development could
markedly help in ensuring and demonstrating such compliance.
