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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

#291

Post by sanityUnbounded »

bonesss wrote: post #267
intended wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always pour water on the AR VR user input ideas - The calorific need is too high - and thinking in 3D results in an unnecessary cognitive load. Since this thread probably has more Finance users than usual - most people have seen a bloomberg terminal. Its ugly, and filled with arcane short cuts. Its extremely extremely good at getting its job done, and keyboard short cuts and commands are the fastest system once you…

To bolster you point even further: take something like air-traffic control. Operators are so in tuned with the incoming data that they intuitively make 3D maps in their head, while requiring 2D data for quick observation, comprehension, and real-time monitoring. Working in a 3D space makes sense for blocking out movies, exploring physical architectures, or certain kinds of research. For everything else there universe…

I think you are right. But while I think AR/VR is good for the types of research you mentioned at first glance, I have not seen any comprehensive prototype for working with elementary mathematics in 3D space taught in schools. So I hope you are wrong, and there is room for a hands on/physical type of math.

If something comes out that can help students who struggle with math visualize those concepts in a more (to them) natural way I will be thrilled. To me these concepts were always very visual, and allowed me to pick up concepts in class by thinking that way. I only have experience in the U.S. education system, and in my experience it felt that my teachers always taught in a way that emphasized problem memorization and notation over actually understanding, mentally, the abstract concepts and problem solving. This seems like a barrier for the average student, and leaves a lot of people feeling left behind or "not smart" even though it is likely a fault in the way they are taught.

If something comes out that will allow those mental barriers to be broken, I will consider it a win.

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

#292

Post by teilo »

I'm surprised the use of BI tools that integrate with Excel has not come up in this discussion. For example, Oracle EssBase (part of Hyperion) is comparatively inexpensive, and it is used in Excel via their SmartView plugin. You get all the power of Excel with live data, and flexible data models driven by an OLAP datastore. It has revolutionized our month-end and commissions process (now takes a fraction of the time), while still allowing the flexibility of Excel.

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

#293

Post by rjbwork »

cm2187 wrote: post #227
rjbwork wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 window…

Yeah but data analysis is only one of many usages for Excel. Let me give you a practical example I ran last week. I want to construct a portfolio of loans starting with an existing portfolio, such that it follow a certain total balance and maturity profile through time, by replenishing it every month with new loans of various maturity (I am solving for the individual notionals of these new loans). So inputs are 1. th…

Personally I'd just throw it into a number of SQL Lite table and run Linq to it via EF. Or just write SQL against it. Pretty much just text files.

If it were too big (probably not if Excel can handle it) I could also just load up the data into memory via a TSV/CSV deserializer, of which there are a few for .NET. If it comes as excel from the source, excel extraction is a piece of cake these days (the codebase I work on takes excel as raw input for data feeds).

As for nothing else letting you build/change/copy/paste data into a table, Sublime Text Advanced CSV package is fantastic for editing tabular data, and Sublime Text has no problem handling files many gigabytes in size.

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

#294

Post by kerbalspacepro »

GFischer wrote: post #270
blackoil wrote: post #90

Excel is functional, free form and fast. It ain't going anywhere. MS need to fix multi user workflow and add versioning.

I've heard Excel mentioned as the real reason for the Microsoft Office lock-in and cash cow. Word and PowerPoint can be easily replaced.

PowerPoint can't easily be replaced actually... because how it links up with Excel!

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

#295

Post by j_s »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #109
j_s wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few are willing to run random programs in interpreted languages. Most wouldn't have the required runtime(s), and things like PowerShell have a stigma that an .XLSX does not.

Everyone has a javascript-interpreter installed.

If you are talking about the browser, they are all locked down to prevent JavaScript execution from local files.

If you are talking about WScript on Windows (I doubt it), it has an even worse reputation than PowerShell.

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

#296

Post by lxchase »

intended wrote: post #208
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…

As unpopular as it would be to say - Stop trying. Excel is a phenomenal accomplishment, and while everyone may talk about a better spread sheet, the market really doesn't want it or need it. Its basically craigslist. The only people who think it can be or needs to be done better are primarily not the users. Excel is the human condition, messy, varied, capable of doing many things and most of the features aren't used,…

There are a few regex based add-ins for excel that might work for your needs. (I haven't ran these myself however).

http://www.codedawn.com/excel-add-ins.php http://blog.malcolmp.com/2010/regular-expressions-excel-add-...

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

#297

Post by tmzt »

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...

Or you could:

   unzip *.xlsm
   git add .
Probably with some custom diff scripts for the xml files.

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

#298

Post by hjalmarg »

The world - rightfully - has a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. As many of the comments here point out, it is a much more nuanced subject than the referenced article suggests. For those interested in a little deeper dive I recently wrote this three-part blog series on the origin and nature of spreadsheets:

- Spreadsheets are programs: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou...

- Spreadsheets made the PC market: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou...

- Spreadsheets are everywhere: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou...

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

#299

Post by ghostly_s »

gaius wrote: post #249
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…

Exactly this. I dunno if you have seen old movies where there is a guy at a desk and in front of him is a pad - built into the desk - with large stacked sheets of paper tucked in at the corners to hold them down, A3 size or larger. This was used to just do any quick bit of writing, make a note, do a calculation, sketch something out, whatever. When a page had been sufficiently dooodled on it was just peeled off the t…

Derail but, no, I've never seen such a thing as you describe. Any movies in particular that feature this?

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

#300

Post by hyuuu »

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…

this is a very accurate observation of the state of excel. I have always thought that the solution is the have an optimized portion of spreadsheets, specific to the use case, in your example a model that is deployed as a web app. Making a better spreadsheet is a very good point, I wonder, if there are attempts already to solve it from this angle?
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