Expector Setup

This setup installs Expector, an Excel plugin for Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013, running on Windows XP and up 7. Unfortunately Windows 10 is not supported yet.

After the install
Once you have installed the plugin, your Excel will have an additional tab called ‘Expector’. A good place to start is to click ‘Find existing tests’. Expector will start to look for test formulas you have already introduced. You only have to do this once, if you have saved the cells, you have never do this again. There are two scenarios now:

Expector finds tests: Cool! Add them, and click ‘How well is this spreadsheet tested?’ to know how you are doing. If it is 100%, awesome, you are done! Continue reading at ‘Running the tests’. If not continue below at ‘Adding new tests’
Expector finds no tests: No worry we will make some together!

Adding new tests
Now we are going to add a few tests together. You can choose to add a complex one (a long formula), a large one (a large value) or a formula that uses a lot of other cells. It does not matter what you pick, Expector will look for a formula and show it to you. If you like the formula as a candidate, click Yes, and you can add a test. You can test types (text, number etc.) or upper and lower bounds.

Running the tests
Cool, we have a ‘test suite’ now, that is a list of tests. You don’t have to, but you can look at them in the Expector-tests tab. Of course we want to know now whether the tests all ‘pass’, whether your spreadsheet is safe. You can do that in two ways: either run them with “Run all tests’, then you get a pop-up with all passed and failed tests, or with ‘Color tests’ that will make all passing tests green and all failing ones red.

Questions?
Let me know at felienne-at-gmail.com