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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

#41

Post by seanmcdirmid »

michaelmrose wrote: post #25
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.…

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

Erm, they would also need a programmer at that point. More to the point, excel is more of a thinking tool that allows for lots of tinkering with real time feedback. Programming languages require lots of thinking up front and are not meant for thinking without significant augmentation (REPL, Jypiter notebooks).

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

#42

Post by michaelmrose »

maxxxxx wrote: post #31
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.

With Excel any reasonably capable business analyst can do sophisticated calculations quickly without needing anything else. With a web app, SQL database and whatever the ramp up cost is huge in comparison.

The ramp up cost isn't months vs minutes. That is just pure nonsense.

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

#43

Post by jordanb »

adambard wrote: post #22
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.…

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.

Not really. They could be trying to build a company-wide data lake. Some files in the lake will be very small, others will be very large. Because it's in HDFS it won't matter if the very small ones suddenly become very large.

End users groan because people groan every time anything changes and they have to learn something new.

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

#44

Post by djtriptych »

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...

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

#45

Post by watwut »

michaelmrose wrote: post #25
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.…

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

It might take a time till coder has time for it. And coder may misunderstand requirements and needs time to get them.

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

#47

Post by philipov »

osrec wrote: post #32
EpicEng wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except excel is a generic solution. If you have to build a specific solution for each processes your costs skyrocket and people lose the ability to quickly implement something on their own. Everything takes forever to get done because you're constantly haggling with development and writing requirements instead of just opening excel and getting work done.

Not really. In the long term, reg fines and dev costs balance out.

Citation please.

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

#48

Post by michaelmrose »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #41
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.

Erm, they would also need a programmer at that point. More to the point, excel is more of a thinking tool that allows for lots of tinkering with real time feedback. Programming languages require lots of thinking up front and are not meant for thinking without significant augmentation (REPL, Jypiter notebooks).

Excel is a garbage environment and its pretty trivial to find environments that provide both a capable environment AND immediate feedback.

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

#49

Post by bischofs »

alecco wrote: post #23
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…

> The same excel workbook that let's the traders do their job would take months / years to convert to a web app, and even then, the speed may not match up. Sorry but I have to call nonsense on that part. I've seen recently a whole trading operation converted to a system very close to a web app within 6 months. The hard part of the job was untangling the mess they created. And knowledgeable quants who actually program…

I work with engineers (mostly mechanical) who are in the same boat. We built a quick python app to do in ~30 seconds what their excel/VBA shit fest did in 45 minutes.

Excel and the like are better than nothing and for most non programmer numbers people probably fine - but if you need some real heavy lifting I would bring in the bug guns.

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

#50

Post by threatofrain »

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.

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