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

For many years I was the contractor that came in to work with the Subject Matter Experts (SME) using Excel and Access, bypassing the IT department. My role was to review with each user their Excel and Access usage and make sure that we could make life simpler for them. If this meant automating some process they did with Excel then that's what I did.

Pharma company - took the manual Excel process and automated the living daylights out of it so that what the departing analyst took days to do would now be done in minutes.

Petrochemical company - took the reports being done in Excel by a petroleum engineer (each taking 2 hours to do each) and automated to allow him to do the reporting for 50 client companies in under a minute.

Whether Excel or Access, these tools will be used by the SMEs and nothing any IT department does will change this. What IT needs to do, is make sure that the models used are accurate and that the spreadsheets and databases are correct.

Most people who use either Excel or Access make interesting blunders in their creations and end up basing decisions on incorrect output from their creations. It takes an experienced and clue-in developer (IT person) to speak with and then analyse the creations to make sure they actually match what is required.

For those of us who do this kind of work, we must understand that the SMEs are those trying to use Excel and Access and that we are there to help them achieve the SME's desired outcome. The SME's need to understand that they are NOT SME's when it comes to Excel and Access, which most seem to never get this point.

There's honestly nothing impressive about copy+paste data and basic cell manipulation and formatting - you could do that in Google Docs. Where Excel is really entrenched is in VBA scripts and macros that are written and shared

ie. what Shkreli is doing there most would do with MSXML + SEC feeds or with the Bloomberg Excel Add-On

Mission Critical Finance Model v4 FINAL_revised (2) - Copy (2) (2).xlsm

Exactly this.

Shameless plug: I am a founder of AlphaSheets, a company working on solving all of these issues. It's quite scary (building a spreadsheet is like boiling an ocean) but our mission feels very meaningful, we're well-funded, and we are now stable and serving real users.

A big problem in finance workflows is that there is a tradeoff between several factors: correctness, adoption / ease-of-use, rapid prototyping, and power. We aim to solve several of these major problems. We've built a real-time collaborative, browser-based spreadsheet from the ground up that supports Python, R, and SQL in addition to Excel expressions.

Correctness is substantially addressed, because you don't need to use VLOOKUP or mutative VBA macros anymore. Your data comes in live, and you can reference tables in Python as opposed to individual cells. A lot of operational risk goes away as well, because the AlphaSheets server is a single source of truth.

We help with adoption of Python and adoption of correct systems as well. You can gradually move to Python in AlphaSheets -- many firms are trying to make a "Python push" and haven't succeeded yet because the only option is to move to Jupyter and that's too much of a disruption. It's less brittle than Excel. The important keyboard shortcuts are there.

And finally, the entire Python ecosystem of tools (pandas, numpy, etc.) and all of R is available, meaning that many pieces of functionality that had to be painstakingly built in-house in VBA and pasted around are simply available out of the box in well-maintained, battle-tested packages.

Our long term plan is to broaden our focus into other situations in which organizations are outgrowing their spreadsheets. We think there's a lot of potential with the spreadsheet interface but the Excel monopoly has prevented meaningful innovation from happening. For example, every BI solution tries to be "self-serve" and "intuitive" these days, but encounters resistance from users who end up sticking with spreadsheets due to their infinite flexibility and immediate familiar appeal.

We hope to bring the spreadsheet in line with the realities of the requirements of the modern data world -- big data, tabular data, the necessity of data cleaning, data prep / ETL, the availability of advanced tooling (stats, ML), better charting -- because we think there's a giant market of people waiting to move to a modernized but familiar spreadsheet.

If there's anyone interested, contact me, because I'd be very interested in chatting! I'm michael at alphasheets dot com :)

I think "management" that think AI will be a viable replacement for financiers should be more afraid of being replaced than "finance pros."