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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

#71

Post by nordsieck »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #57
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…

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 workb…

Excel is good for many things, but I'm not sure that complex financial models is one of them. Its convenience is balanced out by its lack of testing facilities. If you assume the industry standard of 1-5 bugs per 100 lines of code, you've got a huge liability on your hands.

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

#72

Post by Bishonen88 »

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.

Not saying that I don't believe you, but I've never seen a VBA code that executes longer than 1-2 minutes. What exactly does one do that takes so long?

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

#73

Post by wil421 »

ghostly_s wrote: post #53
jordanb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to understand that enterprise class companies don’t want Access databases under people desks. It might be valid reason for the sales or ordering guy who loses control to complain. For the IT professionals at the company it allows them to create a scalable solution that can be used at an enterprise level.

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

#74

Post by throwaway613834 »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #59
throwaway613834 wrote: post #54

How do finance folks deal with decimals? Doesn't Excel use binary floats? Do they switch to integers?

What? Excel handles decimals just fine.

> What? Excel handles decimals just fine.

I thought it uses binary floats just like any typical computer program? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/78113/floating-poin...

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

#75

Post by j_s »

saagarjha wrote: post #39
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…

Few are willing to run random programs in interpreted languages. Most wouldn't have the required runtime(s), and things like PowerShell have a stigma that an .XLSX does not.

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

#76

Post by djtriptych »

d--b wrote: post #66

Finance 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…

I think pragmatic businesses that employ finance pros / quants are wise to include Excel as an essential part of their product development workflow. Excel is a great prototyping tool, and people are going to use it whether you want them to or not. These folks are motivated by money and don't give a shit about your tool if (they think) it costs them money (or time). Besides that, how many enterprise applications really offer opportunity for prototyping and running small experiments? Excel is to modeling as wireframing is to UI design.

Someone should write a book about productionizing excel models. It's not going away (and shouldn't).

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

#77

Post by maxxxxx »

sokoloff wrote: post #51
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.

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

Agreed. The problem is that RDD works extremely well if you want to get ahead.

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

#78

Post by Aloha »

sgt101 wrote: post #55
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.

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

Sharepoint is where good information goes to die. It's a write only wiki - you put stuff in and you can never find it again.

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

#79

Post by bpicolo »

natural219 wrote: post #26

Wasn't http://witheve.com/ supposed to solve this? I love Chris Granger and his team, but at this point he seems inclined to pivot ideas every 2-3 years, instead of following through with an industry-workable solution to some of these programming problems... See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...

That's not similar at all though. When you're working with rows/columns of numbers, the sort of tabular data people are working with, excel is an insanely efficient UI solution. Widget based solutions can't compete with that.

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

#80

Post by ig1 »

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…

Unless it's changed in recent versions Excel isn't threadsafe, so using realtime updates is something that works 99.9% of the time and blows up the other time leaving no evidence behind it when it comes to audit.
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