Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're putting Excel-sized data in Hadoop, something has gone seriously wrong in your IT department's decision-making process. It does make for a nice parable about the dangers of shiny-new-thing-syndrome though.
Yep. this is going on everywhere. How many solid but boring Java applications have been replaced by a microservice, cloud, NoSQL, NoieJS monster?
Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
211–220 of 317 posts
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#212Earlier 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...
I was once on a team piloting a new inventory planning model in Excel, testing it out at a handful of distinctively different manufacturing sites to stress test it before paying SAP's ransom to bake it into the official system.
When I started, I was backfilling someone who created the Excel model and was responsible for batch exporting data from SAP, crunching the numbers in Excel, and sending that out to the sites every morning. My onboarding consisted of being given his laptop and his login credentials[1], and being met with a desktop full of dozens nested folders of Excel sheets in that exact version control format. I still have nightmares of that week.
[1] My manager had successfully kept IT from being able to get the laptop for re-imaging. But my senior VP located on a different continent had to get involved to get IT to reset the guy's password for us.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#213Earlier 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…
It's not great, but there's an existing SQL IDE called Microsoft Query. You can find it in the Data > Get External Data > From Other Sources area of the ribbon. It's straight out of the Win3x era graphics-wise but it lets you do drag-and-drop style query structures. It does fall apart horrendously once you get to anything approaching complex datasets with many tables, joins, etc. but the precident is there for a graphical IDE baked into Excel.
I used ODBC connections to pull in data for further manipulation in Excel to run a ~$200m project for a couple of years. It saved a great deal of time compared to the manual system that was in place prior whilst presenting the data in the familiar excel system which didn't scare away the old baby boomer who was doing all the manual work beforehand. Once I set up the queries and showed him how to refresh the data from the ribbon, he was able to do it without breaking it and whilst still feeling at home enough to get the job done on his own initative.
edit: I note that the above all falls apart somewhat when you need R/W access to your DB. I've only ever done SELECTs because I want to know info from a DB, crunch numbers, then feed decisions into another system. I don't know if you can UPDATE, INSERT, etc. via Excel/MS Query as I've simply never tried it.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
... 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.
From what I can determine, the authoritative version was always the one with the later timestamp. This might have worked at least in theory, however there were always issues. The foremost issue was that the timeserver was virtualized, and drifted to an unbelievable degree. This issue was compounded by the fact that we used citrix virtual machines for some applications, and our local desktops for other applications. T…
sounds like talesfromtechsupport material.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#215Every 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…
I don't necessarily agree with this. If you audit finance, you break open their speadsheets and step through it all. It's even got some basic tools for this - Formulas > Formula Auditing in the ribbon. The spreadsheets become an auditable artifact.
Your objection seems to be more that it's proprietary and you can't crack it open with any tool you like. Finance doesn't really care about closed ecosystems though (case in point, Bloomberg).
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oh hey, how is the Power BI eval going?
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's only true if the management level can't see that they are screwing themselves over, either willingly or ignorantly.
Hiring a hadoop guy for what used to work in excel is a bad decision in most ceases...
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#218The 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.
I wonder if this also describes scientific programming pretty well.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#219Finance 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 think the spreadsheet is fine, it just needs a source control and debugging framework on the site.
Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
#220Most 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.
Indeed, I've seen people who were power users in the more sophisticated computational software, yet still used Excel when they found it to be useful.
The hard thing for me in Excel is visualizing the data flow. Long ago I wrote a VBA macro that would return the formula contents of a cell, and I'd just put that next to each formula cell. That way, I could see what all of the formulas were doing. My sheets were hideous, but if I was working through something complicated, it helped me troubleshoot mistakes.
I now prefer Jupyter/Python, but still can't claim that it's quicker for the smallest jobs.