11–20 of 108 posts
I disagree. Where I work, we have one person that does all the hedging, price calculations and other financial modeling and he only uses Excel. The only practical downsides to his use of Excel it's that he doesn't have direct database access so we generally need to create the initial reports to give him the data and secondly Excel can only hold a little over 2M rows.
Considering Microsoft recent involvment with R I have the crazy hope that future versions of Excel will be shipped with R as a scripting language.
There is an Excel addin (RExcel) that allows the use of R from within Excel. But it's proprietary.
How does LibreOffice compare?
It's just as unsuitable. But there are plenty of open source packages that R the right tool for the job...
""" Solution #2: Alternatives to Excel Yalta (ref 1) states that p-values [inverse probability distributions] reported by the free OpenOffice’s Calc spreadsheet and the open-source Gnumeric spreadsheet do not have the same numerical problems as does Excel - their programmers used accurate algorithms."""
It is not surprising because with an open source program everyone who can program can fix such issues, while with Microsoft you are at the mercy of the likely overworked Excel team.
I disagree. Where I work, we have one person that does all the hedging, price calculations and other financial modeling and he only uses Excel. The only practical downsides to his use of Excel it's that he doesn't have direct database access so we generally need to create the initial reports to give him the data and secondly Excel can only hold a little over 2M rows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just as unsuitable. But there are plenty of open source packages that R the right tool for the job...
The article disagrees with you """ Solution #2: Alternatives to Excel Yalta (ref 1) states that p-values [inverse probability distributions] reported by the free OpenOffice’s Calc spreadsheet and the open-source Gnumeric spreadsheet do not have the same numerical problems as does Excel - their programmers used accurate algorithms.""" It is not surprising because with an open source program everyone who can program ca…
[meta: If you want to quote, use two spaces at the beginning of every line, see https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc]
I disagree. Where I work, we have one person that does all the hedging, price calculations and other financial modeling and he only uses Excel. The only practical downsides to his use of Excel it's that he doesn't have direct database access so we generally need to create the initial reports to give him the data and secondly Excel can only hold a little over 2M rows.
The problems with Excel appear when the incoming data is "dirty". Outside the finance industry there less financial incentive to ensure data is reliably interpreted in Excel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article disagrees with you """ Solution #2: Alternatives to Excel Yalta (ref 1) states that p-values [inverse probability distributions] reported by the free OpenOffice’s Calc spreadsheet and the open-source Gnumeric spreadsheet do not have the same numerical problems as does Excel - their programmers used accurate algorithms.""" It is not surprising because with an open source program everyone who can program ca…
At this point I doubt Microsoft can change the fundamental way how Excel calculates any more, because it would break too many existing workflows, see https://xkcd.com/1172/ [meta: If you want to quote, use two spaces at the beginning of every line, see https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc ]
Considering Microsoft recent involvment with R I have the crazy hope that future versions of Excel will be shipped with R as a scripting language.
I disagree. Where I work, we have one person that does all the hedging, price calculations and other financial modeling and he only uses Excel. The only practical downsides to his use of Excel it's that he doesn't have direct database access so we generally need to create the initial reports to give him the data and secondly Excel can only hold a little over 2M rows.
We used to buy in signals from a company who did their work in Excel. I wrote some scripts to export the data and recalculate it in Python. Almost every month I found errors in their reports and had to ask them to fix it.
So I recommend you fight HARD to get someone to reproduce his work in a language that is visible and reproducible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just as unsuitable. But there are plenty of open source packages that R the right tool for the job...
The article disagrees with you """ Solution #2: Alternatives to Excel Yalta (ref 1) states that p-values [inverse probability distributions] reported by the free OpenOffice’s Calc spreadsheet and the open-source Gnumeric spreadsheet do not have the same numerical problems as does Excel - their programmers used accurate algorithms.""" It is not surprising because with an open source program everyone who can program ca…