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I had a summer job in 1997 at a large Insurers (kill me), and people on my team would spend at least half an hour a day waiting for networked, dependent Excel f
by macca321 10y ago
I had a summer job in 1997 at a large Insurers (kill me), and people on my team would spend at least half an hour a day waiting for networked, dependent Excel files to calculate after opening them.
Since then, I have always suspected it was still a problem in large financial institutions, although the few times I mentioned it to people they looked at me blankly. Now I feel vindicated!
Out of interest, does the Financial Industry use any analogues to source control and unit testing for spreadsheets?
- osullivj 10y agoThere are several vendors out there selling version control for spreadsheets like pathio, Finsbury Solutions. IMHO the problem is that devs know the value of version control, but it's a hard sell to the busy end users building sheets who see only barriers and controls. I believe unit testing for spreadsheets could eliminate the kind of errors that we saw in the London Whale spreadsheet [1]. SpreadServe's Python API enables you to build spreadsheet unit tests. I really should get round to posting some sample sheet unit tests on github. [1] https://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-excel/ https://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-ex...
- fzumstein 10y agoI wrote a blog post about unit testing Excel workbooks using Python's built-in unittest module: https://www.zoomeranalytics.com/blog/unittests-for-microsoft-excel https://www.zoomeranalytics.com/blog/unittests-for-microsoft...