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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

#161

Post by qwerty456127 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #87

Everyone talks about trying to create a new type of programming environment, something intuitive and visual and that lets you think in new and creative ways. Excel is exactly that. It's easy and nonintimidating to nonprogrammers. It's visual, intuitive, and with a basic understanding of math and an idea of cells you can do a large number of tasks that would otherwise require a program. Yes, it's a problem when it get…

"Everyone talks about trying to create a new type of programming environment, something intuitive and visual and that lets you think in new and creative ways. Excel is exactly that" - yes, it is, except it is a way too old already though all the notable competitors seem dedicating all the efforts to reproducing its legacy as closely as possible. I'd love to see an attempt to design a brand-new spreadsheet from scratch, built around a modern programming language (like Python instead of fossil VBA), modern practical file formats (like HDF5 and SQLite instead of obscure and clumsy xls, xlsx and ods) and all the experience and advances in the UX science accumulated during the recent years. Good news are some projects are heading this way already, e.g. pyspread and jamovi (they can hardly be taketn too serious at this moment but at least they illustrate there are people that see the problems of "classic" spreadhseets and have viable ideas on solving them).

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

opportune wrote: post #141
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…

Ehh I doubt most quants are interacting much with Excel except when they need to work with non-quants. There's not much of a reason to use Excel when you could use something like Pandas instead, plus the Python libraries/environment will make everything non-tabled better to deal with anyway.

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by curun1r »

maxxxxx wrote: post #17
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…

I can see this in my company. IT has for some reason decided to put some data into Hadoop. Now the users need to write spec documents for each little thing and every trivial report takes months to get done. Before they had Excel and could create whatever they needed in minutes. Us programmers don't always make life easier for end users. Often we create a level of bureaucracy. EDIT: I like a lot of the responses here.…

Us programmers also think about things like failure scenarios and disaster recovery. It may be trendy to criticize us for overcomplicating designs--and many do--but non-tech people using Excel are often doing more than just getting the job done...they're creating a disaster waiting to happen.

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

#164

Post by listenallyall »

rukuu001 wrote: post #160
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).

Excel should have a built-in, top-notch SQL editor/IDE. Existing SQL IDEs return resultsets in a grid, thus, Excel is a natural fit. Excel would allow developers to go beyond a SQL IDE by subjecting the results to the rest of the spreadsheet's functionality. Would work great for exploratory analysis or for production reporting.

Currently, running SQL and returning the results to a sheet is possible, but very cumbersome now: either .ODC files, VBA, or PowerPivot, none of which are flexible or developer-friendly.

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

#166

Post by EpicEng »

osrec wrote: post #94
philipov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation please.

Pretty much every rogue trading scandal in the last few years is caused by some guy coming to the front office from the back and gaming the system with knowledge of its weaknesses. In more or less every case, poor front office controls, systems or data practices were identified as the root cause. Example https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/...

And Lord knows software devs never implement poorly secured and/or buggy systems.

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

#167

Post by yosyp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #158
d--b wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

A quick google search shows some people are already working on that, including https://www.pathio.com

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

#168

Post by roenxi »

twic wrote: post #116
ng12 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

Excel sheets aren't very maintainable. You get a big grid, plus named ranges. There aren't good tools for generalisation or abstraction, so big sheets have all the usual problems of bad software: hard to understand, hard to change, full of inconsistencies, etc. There are also no good options for source control, modular reuse, etc. I work on a desk which has a lot of vital calculations in Excel spreadsheets. They work…

Excel spreadsheets aren't maintainable, but in context there are some subtleties. If the process is upgraded to a full-blown piece of 'real' software, now you need a full-blown software dev to maintain it. A better result from more resources isn't a clean improvement, it is just a change.

Straddling the line between 'technically best outcome' and 'cheapest workable outcome' is what businesses strive to do. In most mature businesses change should be approached extremely cautiously; everybody loves changing things and the costs are frequently big.

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

#169

Post by starik36 »

listenallyall wrote: post #164
rukuu001 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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).

Excel should have a built-in, top-notch SQL editor/IDE. Existing SQL IDEs return resultsets in a grid, thus, Excel is a natural fit. Excel would allow developers to go beyond a SQL IDE by subjecting the results to the rest of the spreadsheet's functionality. Would work great for exploratory analysis or for production reporting. Currently, running SQL and returning the results to a sheet is possible, but very cumberso…

There are a number of add-ins that do just that. I've never used any of them, so I can't speak to the quality.

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

#170

Post by christophilus »

maxxxxx wrote: post #17
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…

I can see this in my company. IT has for some reason decided to put some data into Hadoop. Now the users need to write spec documents for each little thing and every trivial report takes months to get done. Before they had Excel and could create whatever they needed in minutes. Us programmers don't always make life easier for end users. Often we create a level of bureaucracy. EDIT: I like a lot of the responses here.…

> Us programmers don't always make life easier for end users.

I'd go so far and say: We programmers often make life more difficult for end users.

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