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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

#201

Post by mr_toad »

munchbunny wrote: post #117
nordsieck wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depending on what kind of firm or sector of the financial industry you're in, financial models have a problem of constantly changing. Web apps and other programmed solutions work well when you have to repeat the same model over and over, but they don't work well if you're constantly adjusting the model or changing its parameters/calculations. In that case Excel's instant update and flexible (but quite powerful) formu…

Nearly every Excel wordbook I've ever reviewed has errors caused by updating a complicated model.

Often this is down to people adding/deleting/copying or modifying rows/columns and forgetting to change cell formula.

So, in theory you can modify a workbook and get instant results. In practice this seems to be nearly impossible to to get right.

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

#202

Post by rukuu001 »

listenallyall wrote: post #164
rukuu001 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do we make a better spreadsheet..." Some things I'd like to see: - "Git for Excel" Diffs, tags, push changes to individual sheets or regions. - Snapshots: Create 'Time Machine' type interface for spreadsheet regions. - Collaborative editing. - Access control. - First-class support for model verification (folks roll their own at the moment).

Excel should have a built-in, top-notch SQL editor/IDE. Existing SQL IDEs return resultsets in a grid, thus, Excel is a natural fit. Excel would allow developers to go beyond a SQL IDE by subjecting the results to the rest of the spreadsheet's functionality. Would work great for exploratory analysis or for production reporting. Currently, running SQL and returning the results to a sheet is possible, but very cumberso…

Heh, I didn't mention that because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114421

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

#203

Post by apthnz »

zgao wrote: post #178
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. 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 prototy…

I'm a Product Manager who uses Excel extensively at work and is also learning Python in the evenings.

This is the sexiest thing I've seen since I kissed my girlfriend goodbye this morning.

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

#204

Post by oldandtired »

JustAnotherPat wrote: post #97
sokoloff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're practicing RDD -> "Résumé Driven Development"

you laugh, but a guy who knows Hadoop is worth more than a guy who doesn't all else being equal

One must disagree with this. It doesn't matter what the technology is, if one has the appropriate mindset and enough years under the belt, it will be picked up.

What matters in terms of better value is whether or not one can understand the problems space and find an appropriate solution for it. All sorts of solution space solutions can be used, some of which are better than others. The point is to try and keep it simple enough for the user, irrespective of how difficult it might be for the IT guy.

The knowledge of Hadoop in and of itself is not as valuable as one would suggest it is.

[Edit fix wording]

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

#205

Post by oldandtired »

christophilus wrote: post #170
maxxxxx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see this in my company. IT has for some reason decided to put some data into Hadoop. Now the users need to write spec documents for each little thing and every trivial report takes months to get done. Before they had Excel and could create whatever they needed in minutes. Us programmers don't always make life easier for end users. Often we create a level of bureaucracy. EDIT: I like a lot of the responses here.…

> Us programmers don't always make life easier for end users. I'd go so far and say: We programmers often make life more difficult for end users.

One would agree with this. Most IT groups I have come across seem to go out of their way to make life difficult for the end user.

This has been a source of work for me over the years, providing a means to bypass the IT department to get end user work done.

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

#206

Post by maxxxxx »

oldandtired wrote: post #204
JustAnotherPat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you laugh, but a guy who knows Hadoop is worth more than a guy who doesn't all else being equal

One must disagree with this. It doesn't matter what the technology is, if one has the appropriate mindset and enough years under the belt, it will be picked up. What matters in terms of better value is whether or not one can understand the problems space and find an appropriate solution for it. All sorts of solution space solutions can be used, some of which are better than others. The point is to try and keep it sim…

Unfortunately that's not how the job market works in most cases.

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

#207

Post by oldandtired »

curun1r wrote: post #163
maxxxxx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see this in my company. IT has for some reason decided to put some data into Hadoop. Now the users need to write spec documents for each little thing and every trivial report takes months to get done. Before they had Excel and could create whatever they needed in minutes. Us programmers don't always make life easier for end users. Often we create a level of bureaucracy. EDIT: I like a lot of the responses here.…

Us programmers also think about things like failure scenarios and disaster recovery. It may be trendy to criticize us for overcomplicating designs--and many do--but non-tech people using Excel are often doing more than just getting the job done...they're creating a disaster waiting to happen.

I have been on both sides of the divide and my view is that the overcomplicated designs are more hazardous. If one understands the end user and their requirements, one is generally able to steer them in the appropriate direction.

However, the general view of IT departments is that they just dictate what they want and not help with what is needed. policy is set and then demanded to be followed with little or no justification to the end user why and how it will benefit the end user.

The number of times that I as IT professional (designer, developer, etc) have had to fight the IT department over some problem to get it solved is far too many. Instead of fixing or changing something that will allow end users to actually get on with their word, IT departments are seen as dictatorial time wasters who don't get back to you to sort out what is needed.

Part of our job is to think of failure scenarios and disaster recovery. This should not get in the road of those using the systems being put in place. The end user has a job to do, we as professionals should be providing good solution to enhance as well as protecting them from any disasters.

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

#208

Post by intended »

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, and results are often horrifying. But it works.

That said, I want regex based search in excel, or better data cleaning tools.

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

#209

Post by bigger_cheese »

listenallyall wrote: post #164
rukuu001 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do we make a better spreadsheet..." Some things I'd like to see: - "Git for Excel" Diffs, tags, push changes to individual sheets or regions. - Snapshots: Create 'Time Machine' type interface for spreadsheet regions. - Collaborative editing. - Access control. - First-class support for model verification (folks roll their own at the moment).

Excel should have a built-in, top-notch SQL editor/IDE. Existing SQL IDEs return resultsets in a grid, thus, Excel is a natural fit. Excel would allow developers to go beyond a SQL IDE by subjecting the results to the rest of the spreadsheet's functionality. Would work great for exploratory analysis or for production reporting. Currently, running SQL and returning the results to a sheet is possible, but very cumberso…

One of my biggest concerns about Excel is it integrates poorly with databases.

A notorious thing that happens in my org is an expert user will extract a bunch of data from the source DB tables and dump the data into an excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will pass into the hands of an analyst who will make some tweaks maybe paste in some data maybe manually adjust a few cells here and there and so on and so forth. The spreadsheet will pass into hands of someone else and they will make their own 'adjustments' and so on down the line until finally I will get a phone call along the line of.

"The numbers I have look different to the numbers this other department has in their spreadsheet which is the 'real' value".

Eventually I'll track down the source database and lo-and-behold neither spreadsheet accurately reflects the original database number.

The more hands a spreadsheet passes through the greater the chance of original data being modified into something irreconcilable.

I've played around in the past with linking spreadsheets to DB directly and populating cells via SQL but it fell afoul of requiring various DB/2, oracle, OLEDB etc drivers to be installed on every PC you wanted to open the excel file on and each of those computers required having data source correctly configured via control panel - nightmare for places like my workplace because Windows PC's are all locked down so you'd need to submit a service ticket for every PC you wanted to be able to open spreadsheet on.

This was some years ago but I don't believe anything has changed with way database connection configuration works in Windows client world.

I much prefer the way Dedicated BI tools like COGNOS / SAS etc work. In that situation the user authenticates to the BI software (running on a central server) - the server has all of the DB connections configured and the server executes the DB query on behalf of users.

Our org is currently evaluating a newish Microsoft product called "Power BI" which uses something called an enterprise gateway more info here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-on... I don't know all the details but seems promising solution for our org's data sharing issues at least.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

apthnz wrote: post #203
zgao wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prototy…

I'm a Product Manager who uses Excel extensively at work and is also learning Python in the evenings. This is the sexiest thing I've seen since I kissed my girlfriend goodbye this morning.

[deleted]
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