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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

#301

Post by rabboRubble »

cm2187 wrote: post #245
rabboRubble wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in global banking environments (where one holding company contains a traditional banking arm and a securities firm) with a slight lean towards securities operations, although I've serviced both the banking and securities operations. Your exact comment happens constantly in global banking firms. If the banking arm happens to be in a stronger management position, they push towards locked down system with ti…

And I am sure that like me, you have witnessed multiple production systems used for critical missions that are simply too old or expensive to update, or that have been marked legacy but never replaced. These systems are as problematic as spreadsheets.

Yep!

These ancient systems are one more reason why Excel spreasheets exist. The Excel file backfills missing functionality in the ancient system to permit the end user to do their job as defined some 30-40 years after the legacy system first came online!

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

#302

Post by rabboRubble »

analog31 wrote: post #287
rabboRubble wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure... would be interesting if you could describe a situation in that field?

Granted, I don't know if what I do qualifies as "scientific programming," but I'm a scientist working at a company that makes measurement equipment. I don't write software for widespread use, but use programming as a problem solving tool for modeling, data collection and analysis, visualization, and so forth. I rarely run a program more than once before I change it. Now, maybe I'm excusing myself for being relatively…

Similar underlying dynamics for sure.

Users have job demands, so they find an IT tools to do their work better / faster / smarter. The request goes to the IT department that needs to manage support costs, firm wide licensing requirements, ITIL process demands, and the user request easily goes into a back hole. User base unhappy, pressures IT, IT feels heat and worries about their job so IT fudges X in their process to implement, wash rinse repeat.

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

#303

Post by notyourday »

UK-AL wrote: post #243
ilkan wrote: post #231

Former finance developer: 1. Without Excel, every finance company will need another 100 developers, BA's, managers and QA to do programming and updates. $$$$. 2. Most of the data sources I've seen are heterogenous or very expensive. It comes in from big companies via secure FTP overnight, small companies via pdf. Big companies won't change their rules for you, small ones don't have the staff to do it. You can quietly…

"untrained/low social sensitivity/ESL/fragile egos/tend" I don't think that's dev's problem. I think it's more like how society likes to treat devs. I'm telling you now, fund managers are bigger prima donnas than devs. But they make tons more money for the fund and so everybody steps inline.

Fund manager: profit

Developer: overhead

If you do not believe me, go ask your manager.

It is not different from food service

Customer => profit

Restaurant staff => overhead

The job of overhead is to enable making of profit. Without profit, developer would be out of a job. Without developer, fund manager will not be out of a job - he would be using Excel.

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

#304

Post by btilly »

emidln wrote: post #191
sdrinf wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds an incredibly useful capability to have. May I ask which data connector did you used to pull data, and how did you made it available in that format from the app side?

Excel has a feature for pulling data stored in HTML tables into a sheet called "Web Queries"[0]. It also has a feature for automatically building these in the form of .iqy files. When I worked at Abbott Labs, it was a big deal to be able to offer export-to-Excel in a way that Excel could refresh automatically (or manually). This made it a breeze since we could register an .iqy serializer for a dataset and just give a…

That was exactly how I did it. The only major downside was that I had to be sure to keep the html consistent, and couldn't require login.

Since it was a system for internal use, that was deemed acceptable.

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

#305

Post by munchbunny »

mr_toad wrote: post #201
munchbunny wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe that implies that we just need to start teaching analysts to write code, but the problem is that when you switch from spreadsheets to honest-to-goodness text-based code, you're just trading one set of problems (spreadsheet mistakes) for another (bugs in your code).

In the end I'm personally still in favor of Excel because it has a much gentler learning curve, though you are right that bulk operations in Excel are ripe territory for errors. I don't think it's "nearly impossible" though, it comes down to following best practices the same way you would in any programming language.

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

#306

Post by simooooo »

endorphone wrote: post #179
simooooo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently web-ifying a huge pivot table (30+ columns) into a dynamic library SQL report for access via the web. It's a nightmare of horribly complicated aggregate grouping/totalling across many columns. Additionally the original excel sheet made incorrect assumptions, resulting in a re-specification/design of what all the totals actually count. NOT speedy.

"Additionally the original excel sheet made incorrect assumptions ... NOT speedy." So...not as I described then? If you are evaluating assumptions and going back to the drawing board, of course it won't be speedy. The point is that if it's simply a requirement to be implemented as is, it is a quick and speedy process. And it is. I mean, there are dozens of products that will automate the entire process it's so rote.

No but I don't think what you described exists but for the most basic scenarios.

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

#307

Post by nicolaskruchten »

simooooo wrote: post #144
michaelmrose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that can be done in minutes with Excel could be done in relatively short order via an actual programming language.

You ever tried to implement a generic pivot table builder? Good luck. See you in 2019

I have! Twice :)

https://pivottable.js.org/ and https://react-pivottable.js.org/

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

#308

Post by mulmen »

bkor wrote: post #281
mulmen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen two consistently created Excel workbooks. There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world. It's possible that a more formal system would have less duplicated effort. It's also possible that doesn't matter. "Everything takes forever because you have to write requirements" is a feature of software development. At the end you get software that does something that you (presumably) understand…

> There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world. There's usually more people who know Excel than people who can create systems. Meaning, the inefficiency is not that important. Some things just cannot wait or depend on a much smaller amount of people.

On the other hand I spent a lot of time as a data analyst explaining to business folks who "know excel" that their spreadsheets don't match because they used a different definition of week, or revenue.

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

#309

Post by endorphone »

simooooo wrote: post #306
endorphone wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Additionally the original excel sheet made incorrect assumptions ... NOT speedy." So...not as I described then? If you are evaluating assumptions and going back to the drawing board, of course it won't be speedy. The point is that if it's simply a requirement to be implemented as is, it is a quick and speedy process. And it is. I mean, there are dozens of products that will automate the entire process it's so rote.

No but I don't think what you described exists but for the most basic scenarios.

And I absolutely agree. My point was that Excel workbooks exist in a no man's land, where untenable practices are allowed by necessity. When we transition away inevitably we add layers of error checking and validations and security controls and processes, etc, that turn a simple project into a monstrosity. But it isn't that Excel was efficient anymore than having the random cowboy coder throw together the most adhoc thing imaginable (but quickly) is efficient.

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

#310

Post by UK-AL »

notyourday wrote: post #303
UK-AL wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"untrained/low social sensitivity/ESL/fragile egos/tend" I don't think that's dev's problem. I think it's more like how society likes to treat devs. I'm telling you now, fund managers are bigger prima donnas than devs. But they make tons more money for the fund and so everybody steps inline.

Fund manager: profit Developer: overhead If you do not believe me, go ask your manager . It is not different from food service Customer => profit Restaurant staff => overhead The job of overhead is to enable making of profit . Without profit, developer would be out of a job. Without developer, fund manager will not be out of a job - he would be using Excel.

Exactly, it's not negative personality traits that makes developers less influential. It's their role.
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