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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

#251

Post by gaius »

sgt101 wrote: post #55
adambard wrote: post #22

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.

Well, if you are taking many hours to process said data on a single processor machine (say eight cores) then throwing it into an environment where you can crunch it with many cores (say 1440) then this does make some kind of sense. Also putting the data into a secured multi user environment with redundancy and also business continuity. as opposed to fecking sharepoint

Well, if you are taking many hours to process said data on a single processor machine (say eight cores) then throwing it into an environment where you can crunch it with many cores (say 1440) then this does make some kind of sense

Yes but https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-th...

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

#252

Post by jchw »

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 mean personally, I'm OK with just continuing to use Excel. If anything it'd be nice if they made newer APIs. I actually like COM for some reason, but it does feel dated at this point. I bet there are some other APIs, but I'm not in the biz of writing Excel plugins, so I'm not up to date on it. I did it once for fun and never spoke of it again.

But basically, I kind of just want a simple API for interacting with workbooks and providing functions, maybe using embedded JS or Python scripting. That, to me, sounds like it would make Excel a lot more palatable toward developers like it is toward end users. (Honestly, I think what I'm describing is a bit like WebExtensions but for Excel workbooks. I'd dig it.)

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

#253

Post by PeachPlum »

btilly wrote: post #142
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…

At a former job I had to build a reporting system. And had the trust to build it however I wanted. But it was my job to make it sufficiently useful that everyone would use it. The smartest thing that I did was make it accessible from Excel. You could build a spreadsheet off of my report. Refresh the spreadsheet, the report ran, you got updated data. I got essentially 100% adoption, and the rest of my job was spent fi…

Similar here.

My Julia code creates Excel sheets including charts and sparks

I use this shiv to Python's XlsxWriter

https://github.com/lawless-m/XlsxWriter.jl

With a bit of effort you can even make it set up scenarios for Excel solver

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

#254

Post by arkh »

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…

The column / line filter menu is hard to beat and one of the little things making Excel impossible to replace.

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

#255

Post by dm319 »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #152
dm319 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it doesn't use binary-encoded decimal. I guess the precision is good enough...

If precision was sufficient then so many languages wouldn't put in support for decimal data types, right?

Decimal precision isn't so important in modelling. More important in, say, accurate accounting of bitcoins.

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

#256

Post by clydethefrog »

Balgair wrote: post #95
djtriptych wrote: post #44

Watch some youtube vids of Excel pros moving around the UI quickly. There's no other UI I can think of where so much is being done so quickly except maybe a bash pro. America's favorite villain Martin Shkreli was pretty amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...

I'm ok with vi, and ol' Martin 'wurmtongue' Shkreli is pretty good, but what is more amazing is that he has people watching him stream. When you try telling your uncle at thanksgiving (who 'dabbles' in finance) that someone like Grimma there would stream his analysts, let alone that people would watch him, they look at you like you have 10 green heads. Shkreli there is a perfect example of a generation gap.

Not a generation gap. Just the general end conclusion of culture that rewards greed.

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

#257

Post by Havoc »

guitarbill wrote: post #186
Havoc wrote: post #159

Every 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…

>disappointing is the amount of 'finance supposed "professional"' that think that continuing to use Excel is acceptable.

Well I'll be sure to hide my Excel when the software Gestapo shows up.

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

#258

Post by lowkeyokay »

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…

We're currently trying out QueryStorm [1]. It supports SQL through built in SQLite, but you can connect to any DB and get the full SQL feature set of your DB. It's also possible to manipulate data, and automate stuff using C#. So far it's been quite good. Everyone can view spreadsheets created using QueryStorm, but the data will just be plain data unless they have QueryStorm installed. That's the only drawback.

I really thought PowerPivot could be this excellent data tool, but the DAX formula language is just such a pain. I really dislike it. Using SQL og C# is just much more intuitive - especially SQL.

1: https://querystorm.com

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

#259

Post by newman8r »

En_gr_Student wrote: post #19
siruncledrew wrote: post #3

Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel? Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.

It is called "technical debt" and "organizational momentum". What do you do to stop a few million person-years of investment in a toolset without loss of value? ... usually, nothing much. This is one reason that new OS and new Office versions also raise substantial ire in those same folks. There are semiconductor fabs running most of their machinery on Windows XP for the foreseeable future.

and don't tell them if their equipment pops up on shodan unless you want an accusatory tone and questions relating to you being a "hacker"

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

#260

Post by Nullabillity »

threatofrain wrote: post #50
justboxing wrote: post #15

One huge reason why Finance pros in general, and Fund Managers, Brokers, Traders in particular, love Microsoft Excel is because all your formulas and calculations update almost instantly (unless you explicitly disable this feature). So they can apply their business and process knowledge to create tables and formulas, pull data from various sources, and create something that is self-contained, stored locally (inside t…

What I don't understand is when shops start stressing the scalability of Excel, such as accountancy shops that share their spreadsheets around through primitive systems of locking (even some of the big 10 accountancies do this), why they never considered anything like Access. The jump is straight from Excel to full-on DB backend, with no transition in the middle.

If there's something the world needs even less than more Excel, it's more Access.
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