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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

d--b wrote: post #89
djtriptych wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

> Someone should write a book Nah, this is not gonna work... The only way out is to make something that's somewhat like a spreadsheet but with source control, a nicer language etc. I was writing it and then the firm I was working out threatened to sue me for bullshit IP infringement...

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by petepete »

djtriptych wrote: post #44

Watch some youtube vids of Excel pros moving around the UI quickly. There's no other UI I can think of where so much is being done so quickly except maybe a bash pro. America's favorite villain Martin Shkreli was pretty amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...

Also see You suck at Excel by Joel Spolsky

https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c

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

#104

Post by kgwgk »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #88
nordsieck wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only worked in finance for a brief time, but the operating procedure at my job was to formulate models in Excel, then validate them in a formal QA environment before using them in production. I really doubt any major finance player allows someone to whip up a spreadsheet, plug some numbers in and start trading off that information. Excel is valuable in the early stages because it's fast, powerful and easy to collab…

> I really doubt any major finance player allows someone to ...

Clearly you only stayed in finance for a brief time :-)

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

#105

Post by ng12 »

codingdave wrote: post #98
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…

Excel is old-school Business Intelligence. We don't need to make a better spreadsheet, we need to make a better toolkit for data-driven decisions. There is very little reason that all users need to engage with their data in a grid of cells. When BI tools are as usable and flexible as Excel, that is when Excel will dwindle.

> we need to make a better toolkit for data-driven decisions

Why? Excel is ubiquitous, powerful, and accessible. It only really falls apart for huge data sets -- at which point you build a cluster and feed the output back into Excel anyway.

I'll never understand why software engineers feel like everybody else is a caveman banging rocks together. Excel replacements are a hard sell because, by and large, they're not needed.

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

#106

Post by notyourday »

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…

IT and developers need to realize that they are expense generators not revenue generators in 99% of the companies.

IT's and developers' job is support revenue generation, not block it because IT or developers think they have a better way. In most cases IT does not and neither do developers.

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

#107

Post by dmurray »

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.

It's an amazingly pervasive myth taught in CS 101 courses that "you should never use floating point types for currencies, or you might go to jail". In reality floats are fine for most financial applications, and for almost all those that would find themselves in a spreadsheet.

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

#108

Post by IncRnd »

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.

You can pull in data from other sources, your business data is on your company NAS not unencrypted somewhere in the cloud, Excel is faster for real-world volumes of data, group policy & management functions, etc.

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

#109

Post by PurpleRamen »

j_s wrote: post #75
saagarjha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone has a javascript-interpreter installed.

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

#110

Post by chasedehan »

barrkel wrote: post #38
michaelmrose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Does your '=vlookup(x, ...)' have tests surrounding it? How about code review? How about source control?
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