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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

#31

Post by maxxxxx »

michaelmrose wrote: post #25
maxxxxx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Anything that can be done in minutes with Excel could be done in relatively short order via an actual programming language.

With Excel any reasonably capable business analyst can do sophisticated calculations quickly without needing anything else. With a web app, SQL database and whatever the ramp up cost is huge in comparison.

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

#32

Post by osrec »

EpicEng wrote: post #27
alecco wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sorry but I have to call nonsense on that part. I've seen recently a whole trading operation converted to a system very close to a web app within 6 months. The hard part of the job was untangling the mess they created. And knowledgeable quants who actually program…

Except excel is a generic solution. If you have to build a specific solution for each processes your costs skyrocket and people lose the ability to quickly implement something on their own. Everything takes forever to get done because you're constantly haggling with development and writing requirements instead of just opening excel and getting work done.

Not really. In the long term, reg fines and dev costs balance out.

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

#33

Post by allenz »

siruncledrew wrote: post #3

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.

The main reason is that Excel has features for professionals, but another reason is that some companies don't want Google to have access to their data.

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

#34

Post by maxxxxx »

adambard wrote: post #22
maxxxxx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If you're putting Excel-sized data in Hadoop, something has gone seriously wrong in your IT department's decision-making process. It does make for a nice parable about the dangers of shiny-new-thing-syndrome though.

Yep. this is going on everywhere. How many solid but boring Java applications have been replaced by a microservice, cloud, NoSQL, NoieJS monster?

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

#35

Post by rapht »

rabboRubble wrote: post #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.

This - exactly

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

#36

Post by michaelmrose »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #21
noobhacker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever been a power user of Microsoft Excel? And then tried to replicate that functionality in Google Sheets? Or is your aversion mostly to the M- word? I find it funny that when it comes to vi vs emacs (or any such similarly geek-approved thing), fans of each will jump up in arms about the precise reason their platform is better, but the same kind of people would not want to take hundreds of thousands of busi…

Probably because the geeks can consider the virtues of making a spreadsheet vs an application while the office workers are incapable of understanding more than half the equation.

Also office workers can't always be trusted to even plug things in let alone properly assess what an optimal solution looks like.

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

#37

Post by sgt101 »

justboxing wrote: post #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 t…

Errm, I've seen spreadsheets that take an hour to open and "overnight" to update.

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

#38

Post by barrkel »

michaelmrose wrote: post #25
maxxxxx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Anything that can be done in minutes with Excel could be done in relatively short order via an actual programming language.

Adding a new screen to capture information? With a nice graph to display for output? Does it conform to your UI style guide? Does it have passing unit tests? Is it integration tested? Is it code reviewed? Any migrations necessary? Any business continuity ramifications? Etc.

Engineering has overhead otherwise it's just a bunch of cowboys that are no better than Excel hackers - and probably worse, because they have a lot more rope to hang themselves.

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

#39

Post by saagarjha »

j_s wrote: post #29

One interesting aspect of Excel is how a sheet can be shared in a way that a compiled executable can not. Even with all the various viruses floating around, opening a spreadsheet is a common and allowed task as opposed to downloading, installing, and running software. Edit: I suppose this point is mostly about the ubiquity of Excel as a platform. The interesting thing to me was that even otherwise prorietary models a…

Well, Excel is interpreted, so a better comparison would be made against interpreted languages…

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

#40

Post by DanBC »

siruncledrew wrote: post #3

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.

I love other spreadsheets. I use a few of them. My first was Lotus 123.

But Excel is used because it's very very good. Many of the people use it need this one small weird thing, and Excel has it and none of the others do yet. And that one small weird thing is different for everyone.

It's a bit scary to see how much stuff is kept going with scary hairballs of VBA and macros and god-knows-what.

The EUSPRIG has more information. For example, this about spreadsheets in clinical medicine: http://www.eusprig.org/2006/spreadsheets-in-clinical-medicin...

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