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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

#131

Post by dm319 »

I think this whole thread is too strongly biased to assuming that millions of analysts know what the ideal skills and tools for their job are, rather than they started with Excel and they continued with Excel.

The other thing is that people here are comparing moving from Excel to some sort of webapp/db or general purpose language, when actually they should be comparing to numerical computing tools.

R is a far more robust tool for numerical computing than Excel. It doesn't hide errors in formulas not copy-pasted enough, or references that have subtly shifted to an unrelated cell, or the garbage data from a sort that missed a few columns. The entry barrier is higher, but for the complex spreadsheets and models we're talking about, the investment in skills is similar.

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

#132

Post by shostack »

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.

Not sure why you got downvoted as this is a fair question.

I use both on a daily basis. Our org is on the Google Apps for Business stack which is why I use Google Sheets, but I'm considering getting us on Office 365 for the collaboration capabilities of Google Sheets paired with the functionality and advanced features of Excel.

Simply put, Excel can do way more, is faster, and frankly, takes less time to do things in because I'm deeply familiar with it from years of repetition and troubleshooting. There's also WAAAY more documentation and tutorials available for it when you do encounter a problem.

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

#133

Post by cm2187 »

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.

Data analysis is only one of many use cases for Excel.

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

#134

Post by d--b »

jimmcslim wrote: post #123
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.

I strongly believe these are almost there. The interface is what sucks with notebooks. Code should be hidden, cells should be smaller so you can pack a lot more info in them. 2D organization of data is a lot more effective that a long 1D list of things.

I believe OnservableHQ has a good shot at it.

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

#135

Post by d--b »

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.

I'm not saying we should make a better grid of cells, I'm saying we should make a better application container that non-dev people can use.

The big grid of cells is the weakest part of Excel by far!

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

#136

Post by d--b »

jimmcslim wrote: post #115
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…

> The issue is not how to get rid of Excel, it's how do we make a better spreadsheet... Or how do we better support custom tools integrating with Excel. Excel has a number of extensibility models... maybe too many; * VBA, * XLL add-ins (which is a C++ API, but check out the excellent Excel-DNA [1] which is a C# wrapper around this), * Visual Studio Tools for Office, which doesn't support the ability to implement your…

Better addins only means you get to do more stuff with Excel.

Instead of doing one model, you may now be able to do a time series of models, or calculate The VaR (Value at Risk).

There is no end to what people can ask from data. The only limitations are technological. And whatever extension you may have, your users will always push Excel to its limits.

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

#137

Post by cm2187 »

TillE wrote: post #127
dmurray wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even in accounting a certain rounding error is accepted depending on the size of the company. And for pricing financial instruments, prices pretty much always get rounded on the execution (you will never communicate a price with 20 decimals to a client on the phone). Excel rounding is a non problem in finance. Except when you are making exact payments. But payment systems aren’t run in excel anyway.

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

#138

Post by orwin »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #72
bischofs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

copy the spreadsheet, modify some code because the need is sightly different (or the spreadsheet need adjustment) and voila. Either it works just fine on the first time, either you just begun a one hour debugging session.

To me excel is just fine, except when its not. A French bank lost 6 billion ten years ago because one market maker made false entry on a spreadsheat and no one in the back office noticed for more than 2 years. And the back office was not at fault here.

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

#139

Post by orwin »

firefoxd wrote: post #46

Excel is sort of like PHP. The people who want it dead are very vocal. But those who use it, use it to get the job done.

(At least php usage allied with miscondonct never made a bank lose 7.2 billions: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/socgen_hack/)

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

#140

Post by agar »

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…

Version control in Excel VBA is easy.

Just do a Save As..."Mission Critical Finance Model v2.xlsm", then "Mission Critical Finance Model v3.xlsm", then "Mission Critical Finance Model v3a (temp with changes for Jim).xlsm" and then "Mission Critical Finance Model v4 (maybe-trying to merge 3a back-DO NOT USE).xlsm" and so on...

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