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Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
61–70 of 317 posts
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
With Excel I can do things fast, at the beginning, but then I find that it get a bit more tricky, I get lost, I find out that things are wrong, I do more, I want to move to R. I can't move to R. It will take me a week. I have a day. Then I want to move to R, it will take me a month, I have a week, then I want to move to R, it will take me a year, I have a month. Then, I want to drink bleach.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erm, they would also need a programmer at that point. More to the point, excel is more of a thinking tool that allows for lots of tinkering with real time feedback. Programming languages require lots of thinking up front and are not meant for thinking without significant augmentation (REPL, Jypiter notebooks).
Excel is a garbage environment and its pretty trivial to find environments that provide both a capable environment AND immediate feedback.
Please tell me where every user can create his own gui within 5 minutes with shapes, activex controls, pictures, keyboard shortcuts, combine those with code which was created by macro-recording (and as such needs the most basic knowledge of programming if any), that can be opened by almost every PC in the business world (as 99% has excel installed), which comes with 100's functions and formulas allowing to create anything and everything. On top of that, please no higher costs than ~50$/user.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The ramp up cost isn't months vs minutes. That is just pure nonsense.
I disagree. I am working on something right now at my employer where we are taking spreadsheets that have been used for quite a long time (and were created fairly quickly) and they are converting all the business logic to code. Each workbook is taking weeks for them to code and test and then send back to us to sign off on.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything that can be done in minutes with Excel could be done in relatively short order via an actual programming language.
It might take a time till coder has time for it. And coder may misunderstand requirements and needs time to get them.
if it's important then coder has time, coder will understand, and coder will spend the time.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#66Finance dev guy here.
Excel's dominance in the field is because it is an _application container_ that _non_ dev people can use.
The workflow is this:
- old trader guy says to his junior guy: "hey can you look into xxx."
- junior trader guy says: "sure I'll make a spreadsheet for it"
- old trader guy: "great your model is all I need, let's trade"
- several weeks later, IT guy says: "hey you're running a $100m book out of a spreadsheet, we'll make you a nice system for it, cause your stuff will blow up."
- several months later the IT guy comes back with a web app that does the same thing as the spreadsheet.
- old trader guy says: "hey I can't copy shit around, my shortcuts aren't working, I need to be able to do basic maths on the side, I can't save my work, etc."
- IT guy: "ok I'll make you an export-to-Excel button"
Seriously I've seen this happen over and over again.
The issue is not how to get rid of Excel, it's how do we make a better spreadsheet...
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#67Earlier 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.
I mean, end users also groan because the user experience for spreadsheets is far better than writing map reduce jobs. One is a skill that a large percentage of BS graduates have, another is a skill that a small percentage of CS graduates have.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#68One 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…
What I don't understand is when shops start stressing the scalability of Excel, such as accountancy shops that share their spreadsheets around through primitive systems of locking (even some of the big 10 accountancies do this), why they never considered anything like Access. The jump is straight from Excel to full-on DB backend, with no transition in the middle.
The transition isn't free. Additional software means more technical overhead. Now you need to worry about training your teams to understand and maintain an Access DB instead of pure spreadsheets. You'll now also have to worry about hiring people who'll be able to adapt to the new system. You'll probably need to hire a full time DBA too.
Also, if it ain't broke, why fix it? I feel like a transition to a new system at times is akin to a software rewrite.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#69One 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
Simply taking an Excel workbook -- even data connected -- and using that as the requirements that drive an implementation would be extremely quick and speedy, the result having a litany of advantages.
But that's never how such projects go. Instead everyone has to greenfield some idealized pinnacle product.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#70Told hn exactly that a week ago and got downvoted