Most people who haven't used Excel for anything more complicated than their tax returns seriously underestimate its capabilities. I've seen people use Excel as essentially a poor (and impatient) man's MATLAB, doing things like surprisingly sophisticated and responsive, albeit low-resolution, physics simulations.
Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
181–190 of 317 posts
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#182The issue in finance is the speed of change in demands. No formalized system platform with proper change control can keep up. The ability to play with data, the ability to break your work is valuable in end user computing and the type of thing that is hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits. edit: I entire a whole.
> hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits.
This should also be the reason for getting rid of Excel, it is basically inauditable. But then again I guess all the auditing firms (e.g. Deloitte, KPMG, EY) probably have a vested interest in keeping it that way, not to mention all the persons who use this deniability for fudging numbers. I guess we'll always have ethics to fall back on /s
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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…
Two opposite ends of the spectrum. The engineer who has to constantly keep up on the latest technology, then there are people who use excel, which is a program from the beginning of time/Windows.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#184Finance 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…
At a former job I had to build a reporting system. And had the trust to build it however I wanted. But it was my job to make it sufficiently useful that everyone would use it. The smartest thing that I did was make it accessible from Excel. You could build a spreadsheet off of my report. Refresh the spreadsheet, the report ran, you got updated data. I got essentially 100% adoption, and the rest of my job was spent fi…
This sounds an incredibly useful capability to have. May I ask which data connector did you used to pull data, and how did you made it available in that format from the app side?
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am a typical excel power user, and have started to increasingly do work outside of Excel (C# mostly). I find however that Excel is still a formidable GUI, particularly for tabular inputs. One middle ground is libraries like SpreadsheetGear that give you a UI that has an almost perfect excel look and feel while giving you more control. You don't need to integrate your tool in Excel, you can integrate a quasi-Excel i…
I'm a professinal C# dev. When I need to do any one off analysis of data or a running system, I just spin up linqpad, write some C# to grab my data, put it through a functional transformation pipeline with LINQ, then, optionally, graph the results using some WPF graphing components. I hit F5, and my results appear in the window below as either a table of data or a graph.
I don't even have excel installed on my windows desktops anymore. A 50 dollar tool from an upstart programmer is better for me than excel.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#186Every 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…
Not to belabour the editor comparison, but what comes out of an editor is plain text that anybody else can check with any other tool. Excel, not so much.
So what's disappointing is the amount of 'finance supposed "professional"' that think that continuing to use Excel is acceptable.
For a profession that forces everyone else to dot the i's and cross the t's and leave an auditable trail, unsurprisingly they're willing to let standards slip when it suits them. I'm sure we can rely on them to do the right thing though...
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#187Finance 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…
At a former job I had to build a reporting system. And had the trust to build it however I wanted. But it was my job to make it sufficiently useful that everyone would use it. The smartest thing that I did was make it accessible from Excel. You could build a spreadsheet off of my report. Refresh the spreadsheet, the report ran, you got updated data. I got essentially 100% adoption, and the rest of my job was spent fi…
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Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#188Earlier 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…
... wow. Instead of hashing the file contents, it just checked file size? Who came up with this algorithm?! There's plenty of applications that use files of fixed large sizes initialized at install, for performance reasons or just simply so if you're going to run out of space you do so during interactive installation, rather than silently breaking later on.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
People have tried to improve on that big grid of cells since VisiCalc in 1979. Considering it's the weakest part, it has been remarkably difficult to find something better. As someone that spent years being buried in complex spreadsheets for hours a day (and supported and trained others who spent literally 12 hours a day building models), I can't think of a better combination of functionality, capability, and usabili…
And it makes sense why it works so well. On a 2D screen, seeing data in linear rows and columns is the best option because it follows the same format we have been taught verbatim since birth. The first type of data processing a person does is learn to read. Left to right, each letter (column) represents a different sound (value), these letters build a picture, and the more of them there are the more information the story contains (debatable). Then we learn to build our own information by writing.
Then we move on to math, and we still do it with paper, almost as an extension of writing. When doing calculations in class it is natural to keep calculations and values in some type of invisible grid pattern that makes sense to the student. Then we get to the computer, and that format still follows.
Except that the first information processing a person does isn't reading at all. It's learning sounds and words, and we do that by listening and watching others do it. And the first thing we create isn't words on a page, it's likely something physical, in the form of building blocks or some other toy. This type of learning is great, but it can't be replicated well in a school system because it is expensive and doesn't scale well to the real world. If you're going to engineer and design a bridge, you're not going to start by making a bridge. So we're taught to make lines on paper that represent a bridge.
This is where (I hope) AR/VR becomes disruptive. An infinite amount of objects that can represent any piece of data on any scale in non space.
Think about how successful minecraft is. When I first played it made me realize how much creativity I had lost to pen and paper through no fault of my own. I was building logic gates without even realizing what formal logic was until I came to college.
Now make it engulf me, make it blank, and give me a wand and an in game terminal.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#190Finance 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…
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.
I work in a large manufacturing company that gets lots of data about the manufactured product...The business people received a single excel reports from a database. They wanted a fancy UI to export the data (more queries, pull from other databases, etc) into Excel because they do all their analysis in there.
I have no problems about it...less work for me, and they can do their work easily.