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

wsj.com

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

#121

Post by twic »

chasedehan wrote: post #110
barrkel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my experience, the fact there is a human being staring at the output all day goes a long way towards mitigating the lack of automatic tests.

As programmers, we write tests because we can't see what's happening inside the program while it's at work, so we have to give it a thorough exam before letting it do that. Spreadsheet jockeys can take a radically different approach to validation.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

Declanomous wrote: post #112
sct202 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work, we get to the part IT guy part, and then the quote comes out to be like $200k+ (and 6 months) to duplicate a SAS program, Excel spreadsheet, or Access database that an analyst hacked together in their spare time.

Or it could be like the place I worked where IT made as many hurdles as possible to the installation of new software. So I, as a database marketing associate, linked 4 different CRMs used by different departments together using the magic of Access, Excel and VBA. IT found out when they disabled a library (DAO) because "cryptolockers" could use it, only to break almost every single process at my organization. The IT d…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by jimmcslim »

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 also wonder if there is a middle way here... in encouraging greater use of interactive notebook computing such as that espoused by Mathematica, Jupyter Notebook, IPython, etc.

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

#124

Post by natural219 »

bpicolo wrote: post #79
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.

I was talking about thing he was working on in 2014 - 2015, which his website described as:

> On the surface, Eve is an environment a little like Excel that allows you to ‘program’ simply by moving columns and rows around in tables. Under the covers it’s a powerful database, a temporal logic language, and a flexible IDE [Integrated Development Environment] that allows you to build anything from a simple website to complex algorithms.

Now, I guess they're doing something completely different.

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

#125

Post by dm319 »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #74
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, it doesn't use binary-encoded decimal. I guess the precision is good enough...

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

#126

Post by umbs »

Slightly related: NPR's Planet Money ran a show called "Spreadsheets" that gives brief history of Spreadsheets.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/05/17/528807590/epis...

There's a World Championships for Financial Modeling in Excel, it's mentioned in that episode.

https://www.modeloff.com/

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

#127

Post by TillE »

dmurray wrote: post #107
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's all fun and games until you realize that adding a large set of numbers in different orders gives you significantly different results.

Floats are fine for a lot of things, but you have to be really really careful not to overstep into the situations they can't adequately handle.

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

#128

Post by shostack »

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 need to be able to do basic maths on the side"

I'm a marketer who echos the "pry it out of my cold dead hands" statement, and this is an interesting aspect of it that I hadn't thought as much about before.

There's really something to be said for having ALL of the data and model at your finger tips for quick sidebar calculations, and there's something to be said for formatting tools to make it easier to read and work with. Often times I'm building a model or report, and need to do some quick checks against different assumptions, or have a little scratch pad of notes or placeholder values somewhere.

Being able to just toss those into somewhere a few cells over so I can see things in context while I work is a godsend. If the model was built as something with a front-end that didn't expose everything, I'd have to manually copy that info out and just do it in a spreadsheet anyway.

I get that there are times when it absolutely makes sense to not have things live in a spreadsheet, and what the risks are around that. But there's also risk in slowing things down, or not having certain things immediately jump out at you because you're seeing all the numbers change, and can quickly modify things as needed to check yourself.

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

#129

Post by asofasufb »

The original article seemed to me basically an advertisement for the companies looking to replace excel. It also included a wonderful vignette where an executive sitting on a plane could check whether laying off his employees would affect his profits. The article was basically a satire disguised as an advertisement disguised as a criticism of excel.

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

#130

Post by pointytrees »

turc1656 wrote: post #64
michaelmrose wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a coder DOING some of these conversions. I see both sides of the coin here. One additional point I wanted to mention is that once we have done one or two, or a dozen of these conversions, we start to see common themes.

More often than expected, there are mistakes and misunderstandings in some of the spreadsheets. There are inconsistencies in the spreadsheets. In IT we also get calls that a spreadsheet is "locked by someone." Or that someone deleted a spreadsheet.

With code, and databases, we can ensure consistency between operators. We can also leverage the data across other applications since it lives in a database now. We can pull reports for management more easily, and with more automation.

As some other comments mentioned, spreadsheets are great for prototyping, but also have their drawbacks.

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