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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

#281

Post by bkor »

mulmen wrote: post #84
EpicEng wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except excel is a generic solution. If you have to build a specific solution for each processes your costs skyrocket and people lose the ability to quickly implement something on their own. Everything takes forever to get done because you're constantly haggling with development and writing requirements instead of just opening excel and getting work done.

I've never seen two consistently created Excel workbooks. There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world. It's possible that a more formal system would have less duplicated effort. It's also possible that doesn't matter. "Everything takes forever because you have to write requirements" is a feature of software development. At the end you get software that does something that you (presumably) understand…

> There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world.

There's usually more people who know Excel than people who can create systems. Meaning, the inefficiency is not that important. Some things just cannot wait or depend on a much smaller amount of people.

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

#282

Post by bkor »

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?

e.g. when reading in data one cell at a time instead of reading in a range at once. Basically inefficient programming. It's probably not that much about Python vs Excel but more difference in knowledge/expertise/capabilities.

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

#283

Post by vorotato »

ng12 wrote: post #105
codingdave wrote: post #98

Earlier 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…

Probably because studies show that people who use excel to manage finance end up coming up with different numbers. JP Morgan lost 6 billion because of excel, and these are preventable problems. It's because you aren't codifying your process, you're just memorizing it and trusting that your memory won't change. Trusting that you won't miss a step. The moment you start doing serious calculations on your data you would be better writing some form of software which can actually handle the amount of complexity that you have in your job. Excel is opaque, hard to manage, easy to diverge. The agency I'm at have made a tremendous reduction in errors by migrating away from excel. Sure it's more work nailing down every process, but they are actually nailed down and you can see them and evaluate whether they are actually correct. You won't have multiple competing standards within a business because we can share our processes. If you think excel is enough you're either doing very simple or low risk job, or much more likely you are floating a lot of totally unnecessary and expensive risk. In finance CENTS matter.

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

#284

Post by osullivj »

MrMattWright wrote: post #280
osullivj wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story 1 sounds totally nuts, but Story 2 is a common setup in my experience. Using Bloomberg prices on the desktop is a lot cheaper than BPipe - the server side solution for BBG market data. And quoting indicative prices on BBG from Excel is common too. An interesting new startup that I follow - pricingmonkey.com - is doing BBG driven IRD pricing in the browser with an IR pricing library written totally in JS. There…

Yep, that was pretty much it. Price wars over BPipe vs Retuers. "You mean I have to pay twice? Once for my desktop and once for this BPipe thing, and that costs whhhhhaaat? How much?" Also it's not quite as terrifying as firm live pricing, it's only indicative with a good Bid/Offer spread. Enjoyed your blog....I like the Pricing Monkey idea. Would they be picking up the prices from the local machine though? Because s…

Thanks for the kind words on the blog. Yes - PricingMonkey gets the prices via the BBG API. The dev told me he'd coded it in Python.

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

#285

Post by vorotato »

roenxi wrote: post #168
twic wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

If your risk is less than it costs to build the software then that's totally acceptable, but what is unacceptable is billion dollar businesses using spreadsheets to manage critical business operations.

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

#286

Post by cleetus »

dm319 wrote: post #131

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 ro…

And RStudio is an incredible IDE that can help ease that transition.

My boss is an incredibly smart guy, but he worked in consulting for 15+ years and sometimes cannot view data from outside of an Excel perspective. It can be frustrating to have him think that every problem is a vlookup and pivot table from being solved. I think it's easy to become a bit myopic with Excel. It's like if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

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

#287

Post by analog31 »

rabboRubble wrote: post #222
analog31 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this also describes scientific programming pretty well.

Not sure... would be interesting if you could describe a situation in that field?

Granted, I don't know if what I do qualifies as "scientific programming," but I'm a scientist working at a company that makes measurement equipment. I don't write software for widespread use, but use programming as a problem solving tool for modeling, data collection and analysis, visualization, and so forth. I rarely run a program more than once before I change it.

Now, maybe I'm excusing myself for being relatively un-disciplined, and in fact I am working on improving my programming discipline. For instance a colleague and I have begun to use git for a code that we share.

But when I hear people being told that they shouldn't use ad hoc programming tools, and the resulting reaction from those people, I imagine myself in a similar conversation.

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

#288

Post by 1_2__4 »

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…

In business individual productivity is not necessarily the most important thing. Companies are about collaboration and communication and if the tooling doesn’t support that then it’s at odds with the company’s needs. Maybe those two finance guys are less productive but now it’s auditable, regulatory compliant, redundant/backed up, and resilient to either of those two people leaving. That seems like a win for the company even if it’s not a win for employee productivity.

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

#289

Post by osullivj »

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've seen that repeating pattern many times too, and I've been the IT guy as well. IMHO the solution is to serverize and automate the Excel models. See my profile for links to my product that does just that, even for sheets with VBA and addins.

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

#290

Post by intended »

nordsieck wrote: post #71
cloakandswagger wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now that it's a proper application they have to worry about authentication, down time, security, documentation, maintenance, and the customization and changes they could once do in an instant now requires filing a feature request, waiting for it to be implemented and deployed... Even as a software developer I will freely admit that Excel is the right tool for many jobs. We shouldn't be so eager to transform workb…

Excel is good for many things, but I'm not sure that complex financial models is one of them. Its convenience is balanced out by its lack of testing facilities. If you assume the industry standard of 1-5 bugs per 100 lines of code, you've got a huge liability on your hands.

Models have lower bugs.

Your fin model has normal sanity checks and then functional checks.

And in the end the out put must be readable AND make sense.

And whatever bug you have is going to propagate down your projected time series.

Finance chaps use finance as their weapon of debugging. Sure mistakes get through. I’ve seen mistakes get through code as well though.

Also - analysts get fired a lot faster.

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