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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

#51

Post by sokoloff »

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.

They're practicing RDD -> "Résumé Driven Development"

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

#52

Post by turc1656 »

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…

Yes. I use Excel every day and while there are some serious cons (like a large data sets eating up tons of memory, crashing as a result, etc.) it is still an extraordinarily powerful tool. It is also extremely intuitive for the basic user and insanely powerful for the super user who really knows how to take advantage of the more advanced features. And with VBA integrated, it gets even more powerful.

I've seen some pretty amazing sheets/templates put together in a few days that would take programmers weeks or months to put together. And since you don't have to know how to program at all to use it, it's easy to see why it remains around.

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

#53

Post by ghostly_s »

jordanb wrote: post #43
adambard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. They could be trying to build a company-wide data lake. Some files in the lake will be very small, others will be very large. Because it's in HDFS it won't matter if the very small ones suddenly become very large. End users groan because people groan every time anything changes and they have to learn something new.

If users were previously empowered to do a task themselves, and now need to request another team do that task on their behalf, that's a very valid reason to be groaning IMO.

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

#55

Post by sgt101 »

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.

Well, if you are taking many hours to process said data on a single processor machine (say eight cores) then throwing it into an environment where you can crunch it with many cores (say 1440) then this does make some kind of sense. Also putting the data into a secured multi user environment with redundancy and also business continuity.

as opposed to fecking sharepoint

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

#56

Post by itomato »

sevensor wrote: post #18
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.

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 a…

Spreadsheets are a huge risk to everyone, especially those who haven't made the leap to "real" programming.

Excel, 1-2-3, Visicalc are, taxonomically speaking, in the same class.

We have a new order of tools. While they have their own inherent risks, they reflect literally decades of thinking about the risks and limitations of tools whose lineage traces back to Visicalc.

Macro management and security, versioning, distributed access, multidimensionality; all are addressed in a handful of ways with Alpha, Tableau, Looker and other progressive tools.

Excel, floppies, line printers; relics.

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

#57

Post by cloakandswagger »

alecco wrote: post #23
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…

> 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…

And now that it's a proper application they have to worry about authentication, down time, security, documentation, maintenance, and the customization and changes they could once do in an instant now requires filing a feature request, waiting for it to be implemented and deployed...

Even as a software developer I will freely admit that Excel is the right tool for many jobs. We shouldn't be so eager to transform workbooks into formal apps unless there is a really good reason to.

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

#60

Post by trakter »

bischofs wrote: post #49
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…

I work with engineers (mostly mechanical) who are in the same boat. We built a quick python app to do in ~30 seconds what their excel/VBA shit fest did in 45 minutes. Excel and the like are better than nothing and for most non programmer numbers people probably fine - but if you need some real heavy lifting I would bring in the bug guns.

I like that -- Programming should be called a bug gun more often. How can we get more bugs in here, lets bring out the bug guns!!
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