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This. I've been at top 20 banks in the world that run 14 hour jobs in Excel that import data from web services, run analysis, and FTP result sets elsewhere. T
by shaftway 11y ago
This.
I've been at top 20 banks in the world that run 14 hour jobs in Excel that import data from web services, run analysis, and FTP result sets elsewhere. They were used to analyze risk on tens of billions of dollars worth of securities.
They were riddled with bugs, but it let the front-line traders iterate quickly and prototype something that the backend team (my team) could turn into a "real" reporting process.
- nokome 11y agoAbsolutely. I think it is the rapid prototyping aspect of spreadsheets that is perhaps the most powerful. For analysing large amounts of data they are obviously not great. But they excel (pardon the pun) at providing an environment in which to quickly formulate and visualise numerical models - because they are reactive so you can see what happens when you change inputs - without having to recompile, or manually rerun code.