81–90 of 317 posts
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...
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If users were previously empowered to do a task themselves, and now need to request another team do that task on their behalf, that's a very valid reason to be groaning IMO.
You have to understand that enterprise class companies don’t want Access databases under people desks. It might be valid reason for the sales or ordering guy who loses control to complain. For the IT professionals at the company it allows them to create a scalable solution that can be used at an enterprise level.
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Excel is a garbage environment and its pretty trivial to find environments that provide both a capable environment AND immediate feedback.
Please tell me where every user can create his own gui within 5 minutes with shapes, activex controls, pictures, keyboard shortcuts, combine those with code which was created by macro-recording (and as such needs the most basic knowledge of programming if any), that can be opened by almost every PC in the business world (as 99% has excel installed), which comes with 100's functions and formulas allowing to create any…
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> 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…
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.
"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. Excel is a gold mine of undocumented terms, processes and functionality.
It's fast to build but don't pretend it gives any of the benefits of proper software development processes. The value proposition is in fact that it has none of those guarantees.
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 Simply taking an Excel workbook -- even data connected -- and using that as the requirements that drive an implementation would be extremely quick and speedy, the result having a litany of advantages. But that's never how such projects go. Instead everyone has to greenfield some idealized pinnacle product.
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People are wedded to Excel because they've spent a lot of time learning it and don't want their skills to become obsolete. The resistance is rooted in psychological / political reasons, not technical ones.
Have you ever been a power user of Microsoft Excel? And then tried to replicate that functionality in Google Sheets? Or is your aversion mostly to the M- word? I find it funny that when it comes to vi vs emacs (or any such similarly geek-approved thing), fans of each will jump up in arms about the precise reason their platform is better, but the same kind of people would not want to take hundreds of thousands of busi…
People used to use Excel to run regression, visualize data, etc. which I consider inferior to R / Python.
I can't speak about other uses of Excel, e.g. financial modeling, insurance.
Yes, it's a problem when it gets expanded into massive, ridiculous spreadsheets-from-Hell, but most spreadsheets are a tool that let everyone program. People keep talking about some magic new visual programming REPL-like tool that will revolutionize programming, but I think we already have it: it's Excel.
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And now that it's a proper application they have to worry about authentication, down time, security, documentation, maintenance, and the customization and changes they could once do in an instant now requires filing a feature request, waiting for it to be implemented and deployed... Even as a software developer I will freely admit that Excel is the right tool for many jobs. We shouldn't be so eager to transform workb…
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.
I really doubt any major finance player allows someone to whip up a spreadsheet, plug some numbers in and start trading off that information. Excel is valuable in the early stages because it's fast, powerful and easy to collaborate in. Trying to eliminate it just because it's Excel is dogma.
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 think pragmatic businesses that employ finance pros / quants are wise to include Excel as an essential part of their product development workflow. Excel is a great prototyping tool, and people are going to use it whether you want them to or not. These folks are motivated by money and don't give a shit about your tool if (they think) it costs them money (or time). Besides that, how many enterprise applications reall…
Nah, this is not gonna work... The only way out is to make something that's somewhat like a spreadsheet but with source control, a nicer language etc.
I was writing it and then the firm I was working out threatened to sue me for bullshit IP infringement...