Characterizing Failure Points in Rule-Based Spreadsheet Data Transformation: A Stage-Oriented Taxonomy and Empirical Failure Matrix

Rule-based spreadsheet data transformation remains widely used for converting human-centred spreadsheet tables into structured formats for reporting, analytics, and data integration because it is transparent, auditable, and reproducible. However, rule-based approaches often fail when spreadsheets encode structural meaning through visual or layout cues, such as multi-row headers, merged cells, interleaved subtotals, cross-tabulated values, and multiple logical tables within a worksheet. This study characterizes such failures using a stage-oriented taxonomy aligned with a six-stage transformation pipeline: ingestion, region detection, structural interpretation, semantic labeling, canonicalization, and validation. A deterministic baseline pipeline was evaluated against six controlled spreadsheet cases representing common semi-structured layouts. The resulting empirical failure matrix identified 15 severity-2 failures across the controlled cases. The most critical failures were concentrated in merged cell and hierarchy handling, multi-region and boundary interpretation, role mislabeling, wrong granularity, and silent semantic errors. These findings show that many transformation failures are not isolated rule defects but arise from missing pipeline capabilities, particularly explicit hierarchy representation, block-level segmentation, granularity control, and semantic invariant checking. The study contributes a reproducible failure-analysis framework that supports stage-localized diagnosis, comparison of rule-based spreadsheet transformation systems, and targeted improvement of transformation pipelines.

@article{Zaki2026,
  title     = {Characterizing Failure Points in Rule-Based Spreadsheet Data Transformation: A Stage-Oriented Taxonomy and Empirical Failure Matrix},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {17},
  number    = {6},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Fakhrul Adli Mohd Zaki and Mustafa Man and Mohamad Nor Hassan},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170656},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170656}
}