The Oxford researcher who has developed an Excel programming language has also called for the establishment of a kind of Excel component library to cut development time and reduce costly errors.

Jocelyn Paine says that there is currently no Excel equivalent to the component libraries for languages like Java because the only way to share code between spreadsheets is to copy and paste. But he says he has found a way to 'modularise' Excel routines so that can be slotted into different spreadsheets as required.

The advantage is that specialist components can be written by experts and tested before reuse.

Paine is asking for examples of difficult or error-prone Excel tasks that could be usefully modularised. See his site.