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Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

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Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#11

Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel? Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.

Excel is a proper gui, Sheets is remarkable achievement in javascript but sucks to use for more than light work. Even editing a few cells in Google Sheets is fiddly.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#13

Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel? Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.

People are wedded to Excel because they've spent a lot of time learning it and don't want their skills to become obsolete. The resistance is rooted in psychological / political reasons, not technical ones.

Google sheets has a vastly inferior performance and feature set, trying to chalk that up as "psychological / political reasons" is pure spin.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#14
The issue in finance is the speed of change in demands. No formalized system platform with proper change control can keep up. The ability to play with data, the ability to break your work is valuable in end user computing and the type of thing that is hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits.

edit: I entire a whole.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#15
One huge reason why Finance pros in general, and Fund Managers, Brokers, Traders in particular, love Microsoft Excel is because all your formulas and calculations update almost instantly (unless you explicitly disable this feature).

So they can apply their business and process knowledge to create tables and formulas, pull data from various sources, and create something that is self-contained, stored locally (inside the lan, security reasons), is blazing fast, and helps them make money and generate profits for the company.

I've seen very sophisticated OMSs (Order Management Systems) built completely using excel workbooks, with 1 sheet containing orders and formula's to pull realtime pricing from bloomberg, reuters, another sheet for pre-trade analysis, another for the actual trades, and a summary sheet with pivot tables and charts to show the trade progress and summary.

As and when the last_price changes, the formulas update, so the trader is looking at a real-time view of his situation.

The same excel workbook that let's the traders do their job would take months / years to convert to a web app, and even then, the speed may not match up.

I know devs hate Excel, in part, because you are the "IT guy" they call (been there many times) when the spreadsheet gets out of hand, or slows down, or keeps crashing excel after a certain inflection point.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#16

One huge reason why Finance pros in general, and Fund Managers, Brokers, Traders in particular, love Microsoft Excel is because all your formulas and calculations update almost instantly (unless you explicitly disable this feature). So they can apply their business and process knowledge to create tables and formulas, pull data from various sources, and create something that is self-contained, stored locally (inside t…

Someone on HN said this once, and I found it profound and have stolen it:

Excel is the most powerful REPL in the finance industry, and it's ubiquitous.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#17

One huge reason why Finance pros in general, and Fund Managers, Brokers, Traders in particular, love Microsoft Excel is because all your formulas and calculations update almost instantly (unless you explicitly disable this feature). So they can apply their business and process knowledge to create tables and formulas, pull data from various sources, and create something that is self-contained, stored locally (inside t…

I can see this in my company. IT has for some reason decided to put some data into Hadoop. Now the users need to write spec documents for each little thing and every trivial report takes months to get done. Before they had Excel and could create whatever they needed in minutes. Us programmers don't always make life easier for end users. Often we create a level of bureaucracy.

EDIT: I like a lot of the responses here. They clearly illustrate the disconnect between end users and IT/devs in many companies.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#18

Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel? Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.

People are wedded to Excel because they've spent a lot of time learning it and don't want their skills to become obsolete. The resistance is rooted in psychological / political reasons, not technical ones.

I disagree. For users who aren't going to make the leap to "real" programming, spreadsheets are a huge boon. Excel is the only thing many domain experts can use to turn their knowledge into a computational model. Sure, there are tons of problems compared to models implemented in general-purpose programming languages, and we love to complain about the atrocities committed in Excel, but nobody's yet managed to devise an alternative with the same low barrier to entry.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#19

Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel? Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.

It is called "technical debt" and "organizational momentum". What do you do to stop a few million person-years of investment in a toolset without loss of value? ... usually, nothing much. This is one reason that new OS and new Office versions also raise substantial ire in those same folks.

There are semiconductor fabs running most of their machinery on Windows XP for the foreseeable future.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#20

One huge reason why Finance pros in general, and Fund Managers, Brokers, Traders in particular, love Microsoft Excel is because all your formulas and calculations update almost instantly (unless you explicitly disable this feature). So they can apply their business and process knowledge to create tables and formulas, pull data from various sources, and create something that is self-contained, stored locally (inside t…

Someone on HN said this once, and I found it profound and have stolen it: Excel is the most powerful REPL in the finance industry, and it's ubiquitous.

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