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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

#151

Post by agar »

Declanomous wrote: post #150
agar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's true. Good luck doing anything with that though. My main database was up to version 2051 by the time I left. The class I have nightmares about is the "compile and backup" class I wrote, that decompiled the database, appended the date to each file, compared all of the non-data and non-binary components, recompiled the database with the most recent versions, and then made sure every database was linked to the mo…

Just to clarify, I was being sarcastic about it being easy (or actually being version control, for that matter).

But thanks for the horror story. What a nightmare.

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

#152

Post by throwaway613834 »

dm319 wrote: post #125
throwaway613834 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

If precision was sufficient then so many languages wouldn't put in support for decimal data types, right?

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

#153

Post by analog31 »

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.

Man, I'd love to be able to edit tabular data within a Jupyter notebook. Every few months I look to see if this problem has been solved in a tolerable way.

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

#154

Post by jordanb »

klodolph wrote: post #67
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.

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.

You don't need to write map reduce jobs to access data in Hadoop. In fact, you can do it from excel:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Connect-to-a-Hadoop...

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

#155

Post by hexane360 »

agar wrote: post #140
Declanomous wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Mission Critical Finance Model v4 FINAL_revised (2).xlsm

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

#156

Post by jordanb »

maxxxxx wrote: post #82
wil421 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And suddenly every addition that could be done in 5 minutes now takes months or gets rejected by the devs.

Hadoop isn't Oracle. If you need to write a file to the data lake, you write it. If you need to read something out you do that too. There's no schema, it's actually a file system with actual files in it, like your shared drive. Except that it's distributed, can handle arbitrarily large files and lets you perform queries on those files instead of downloading all 2TB to access a single row.

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

#157

Post by qwerty456127 »

IMHO all the people who claim having intelligence and education sufficient for a finance job should be able to use at least basic SQL and/or R and/or Q to work with up-to-date information straight from the databases without importing it to a spreadsheet first. Perhaps I am terribly wrong but my intuition suggests entrusting a company finance to a person unable to learn some SQL/R may happen to be a questionable idea.

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

#158

Post by toomuchtodo »

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...

Sounds like Excel needs a git extension!

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

#159

Post by Havoc »

Every time I (as a finance supposed "professional") comment on finance article on hn I get downvoted to hell.

Note to self - stick to IT stuff when interacting with IT crowd.

Yes dear IT crew, in the IT world virtualisation is in this month and docker next and kubernetes the month after. Finance side it's excel as swissknife this year and probably the next 5 years too. Get over it.

Anyway - see also djtriptych's post and associated video. Notice the complete lack of macros, programming logic, containerisation, automation, APIs or well really anything hn loves. It's just a digital hybrid scratchpad/calculator with a ton of shortcuts that are muscle memory for everyone.

Boggles my mind that HN can understand the whole vim vs emacs wars but not grasp that finance guys like their Excel for the exact same reason. It's disappointingly narrow-minded.

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

#160

Post by rukuu001 »

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…

"How do we make a better spreadsheet..."

Some things I'd like to see:

- "Git for Excel" Diffs, tags, push changes to individual sheets or regions.

- Snapshots: Create 'Time Machine' type interface for spreadsheet regions.

- Collaborative editing.

- Access control.

- First-class support for model verification (folks roll their own at the moment).

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