21 ms·

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

290 points by triplee 9y ago

osullivj 9y ago
Yes - Excel is deeply embedded in actuarial modelling.
- triplee 9y ago
  Modeling yes, which makes sense given that it's a tabular math tool. Using it to handle all the pricing structure for a few thousand clients on the other hand is another issue by having underwriters plug in values that they got from an online application, though, not so much.
  - throw_away54321 9y ago
    This sounds familiar...
siruncledrew 9y ago
Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel? Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.
- therealidiot 9y ago
  Google Sheets kinda sucks performance-wise though
- triplee 9y ago
  It's on everyone's computer in the office, and doesn't require internet or training outside of your non-tech specialty. Also, there's a TON of .xlsx files in the wild with years of business knowledge and processing. Everyone uses about the same 50% or so of Excel, which is captured in Google Sheets and any other spreadsheet. It's the extra 20% that everyone else uses -- and it's a different 20% for everyone -- that causes the issue of entrenchment.
- noobhacker 9y ago
  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.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    Google sheets has a vastly inferior performance and feature set, trying to chalk that up as "psychological / political reasons" is pure spin.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    I disagree. For users who aren't going to make the leap to "real" programming, spreadsheets are a huge boon. Excel is the only thing many domain experts can use to turn their knowledge into a computational model. Sure, there are tons of problems compared to models implemented in general-purpose programming languages, and we love to complain about the atrocities committed in Excel, but nobody's yet managed to devise an alternative with the same low barrier to entry.
    - itomato 9y ago
      Spreadsheets are a huge risk to everyone, especially those who haven't made the leap to "real" programming. Excel, 1-2-3, Visicalc are, taxonomically speaking, in the same class. We have a new order of tools. While they have their own inherent risks, they reflect literally decades of thinking about the risks and limitations of tools whose lineage traces back to Visicalc. Macro management and security, versioning, distributed access, multidimensionality; all are addressed in a handful of ways with Alpha, Tableau, Looker and other progressive tools. Excel, floppies, line printers; relics.
    - noobhacker 9y ago
      I agree 100% that Excel is best for people who aren't going to make the leap#. My point is that domain experts should* make the leap to "real" programming, especially R to handle data analysis. Excel is faster to get started. But for advanced tasks, the time it takes to learn Excel / R is about the same. A big reason why people don't make the leap is because they already spent too much time becoming an Excel expert. Indeed, for young analysts with no baggage, a lot of people learn and use R instead.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files Those things. I literally run and pay for Parallels on my Mac for the Windows version of Excel. (Mostly for the keyboard shortcuts.)
- TimPC 9y ago
  That's a pretty big aside. Like big enough to be a valid reason in and of itself. The other part is performance and interface lag which still tends to be an issue on any reasonable amount of data.
- berberous 9y ago
  Why use VIM, emacs or Sublime Text, when some online cloud coding platform can probably do the same thing? In addition to the things you mentioned, Excel is an offline, native app, with much more speed and efficiency when dealing with complex or large spreadsheets, IMO.
- rb808 9y ago
  Excel is a proper gui, Sheets is remarkable achievement in javascript but sucks to use for more than light work. Even editing a few cells in Google Sheets is fiddly.
- deleted 9y ago
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- En_gr_Student 9y ago
  It is called "technical debt" and "organizational momentum". What do you do to stop a few million person-years of investment in a toolset without loss of value? ... usually, nothing much. This is one reason that new OS and new Office versions also raise substantial ire in those same folks. There are semiconductor fabs running most of their machinery on Windows XP for the foreseeable future.
  - newman8r 9y ago
    and don't tell them if their equipment pops up on shodan unless you want an accusatory tone and questions relating to you being a "hacker"
- kgwgk 9y ago
  VBA, forms, integration with data sources... "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
- allenz 9y ago
  The main reason is that Excel has features for professionals, but another reason is that some companies don't want Google to have access to their data.
- DanBC 9y ago
  I love other spreadsheets. I use a few of them. My first was Lotus 123. But Excel is used because it's very very good. Many of the people use it need this one small weird thing, and Excel has it and none of the others do yet. And that one small weird thing is different for everyone. It's a bit scary to see how much stuff is kept going with scary hairballs of VBA and macros and god-knows-what. The EUSPRIG has more information. For example, this about spreadsheets in clinical medicine: http://www.eusprig.org/2006/spreadsheets-in-clinical-medicine-warning.pdf http://www.eusprig.org/2006/spreadsheets-in-clinical-medicin...
- IncRnd 9y ago
  You can pull in data from other sources, your business data is on your company NAS not unencrypted somewhere in the cloud, Excel is faster for real-world volumes of data, group policy & management functions, etc.
- shostack 9y ago
  Not sure why you got downvoted as this is a fair question. I use both on a daily basis. Our org is on the Google Apps for Business stack which is why I use Google Sheets, but I'm considering getting us on Office 365 for the collaboration capabilities of Google Sheets paired with the functionality and advanced features of Excel. Simply put, Excel can do way more, is faster, and frankly, takes less time to do things in because I'm deeply familiar with it from years of repetition and troubleshooting. There's also WAAAY more documentation and tutorials available for it when you do encounter a problem.
rabboRubble 9y ago
The issue in finance is the speed of change in demands. No formalized system platform with proper change control can keep up. The ability to play with data, the ability to break your work is valuable in end user computing and the type of thing that is hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits. edit: I entire a whole.
- rapht 9y ago
  This - exactly
- guitarbill 9y ago
  > hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits. This should also be the reason for getting rid of Excel, it is basically inauditable. But then again I guess all the auditing firms (e.g. Deloitte, KPMG, EY) probably have a vested interest in keeping it that way, not to mention all the persons who use this deniability for fudging numbers. I guess we'll always have ethics to fall back on /s
  - rabboRubble 9y ago
    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 tight development cycle controls. Typically the bankers have low risk tolerances and their systems (ex. savings and payment client account ledger systems, ATM ops, etc.) reflect it. That said, even in a true banking company, the closer the department is to the interest rating trading operations the more the banking environment looks like a securities operation. You will find critical on-the-fly modeling taking place, data integration, data reintegration all happening in Excel spreadsheets and these XLSX will be driving business decisions. In securities operations the pace of change (demands originating from regulatory bodies, external clients, and internal trading operation, etc.) inevitably push the boundaries of what the bankers can support. If your securities side regulatory body says the firm must implement X in order to report Y, the firm is obligated to do it, regardless of what banking IT risk and change control framework the bank thinks should be followed. If the regulatory body says X should be in place by Z date, and banking assessment / change control procedures can not be finished by Z date, guess what X gets implemented by Z date. There is no choice. Same goes for client system demands. Woe be the IT staff who tries to tell a securities side broker their client demand can not be fulfilled by some change control / risk assessment procedure. Do such a thing enough and the desk's profitability will take a hit. Which means the trader's bonus will take a hit. Which means IT will take a hit. If a proprietary / quant / interest rate trader can't respond quickly enough to market change X because it took 3 days for a revised real time report to be created and then vetted by a formal change management process, the IT staff pushing those processes will be replaced. Looking at the situation another way, having these time sensitive demands in Excel instead of in trading systems is actually kind of smart. Try to integrate the rapid trading desk decision making that happens in Excel into the trading / transaction ledger / transaction settlement system will just endanger the smooth operation of the those systems. Fewer changes the better in these core systems.
justboxing 9y ago
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 the lan, security reasons), is blazing fast, and helps them make money and generate profits for the company. I've seen very sophisticated OMSs (Order Management Systems) built completely using excel workbooks, with 1 sheet containing orders and formula's to pull realtime pricing from bloomberg, reuters, another sheet for pre-trade analysis, another for the actual trades, and a summary sheet with pivot tables and charts to show the trade progress and summary. As and when the last_price changes, the formulas update, so the trader is looking at a real-time view of his situation. 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. I know devs hate Excel, in part, because you are the "IT guy" they call (been there many times) when the spreadsheet gets out of hand, or slows down, or keeps crashing excel after a certain inflection point.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Someone on HN said this once, and I found it profound and have stolen it: Excel is the most powerful REPL in the finance industry, and it's ubiquitous.
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- maxxxxx 9y ago
  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. They clearly illustrate the disconnect between end users and IT/devs in many companies.
natural219 9y ago
Wasn't http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ supposed to solve this? I love Chris Granger and his team, but at this point he seems inclined to pivot ideas every 2-3 years, instead of following through with an industry-workable solution to some of these programming problems... See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...
- bpicolo 9y ago
  That's not similar at all though. When you're working with rows/columns of numbers, the sort of tabular data people are working with, excel is an insanely efficient UI solution. Widget based solutions can't compete with that.
  - natural219 9y ago
    I was talking about thing he was working on in 2014 - 2015, which his website described as: > On the surface, Eve is an environment a little like Excel that allows you to ‘program’ simply by moving columns and rows around in tables. Under the covers it’s a powerful database, a temporal logic language, and a flexible IDE [Integrated Development Environment] that allows you to build anything from a simple website to complex algorithms. Now, I guess they're doing something completely different.
j_s 9y ago
One interesting aspect of Excel is how a sheet can be shared in a way that a compiled executable can not. Even with all the various viruses floating around, opening a spreadsheet is a common and allowed task as opposed to downloading, installing, and running software. Edit: I suppose this point is mostly about the ubiquity of Excel as a platform. The interesting thing to me was that even otherwise prorietary models are more accessible distributed as Excel sheets than better-secured inside a custom tool.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Well, Excel is interpreted, so a better comparison would be made against interpreted languages…
  - j_s 9y ago
    Few are willing to run random programs in interpreted languages. Most wouldn't have the required runtime(s), and things like PowerShell have a stigma that an .XLSX does not.
    - PurpleRamen 9y ago
      Everyone has a javascript-interpreter installed.
      - j_s 9y ago
        If you are talking about the browser, they are all locked down to prevent JavaScript execution from local files. If you are talking about WScript on Windows (I doubt it), it has an even worse reputation than PowerShell.
        PurpleRamen 9y ago
        Yes, browser. Are you talking about Same-Origin-Policy? This shouldn't prevent a script being executed local. It only limits what it can do. Because of security, there is heavy sandboxing with javascript. Anyway, it wouldn't be hard to transform browsers in full fledged local scripting-engines, without dismanteling security.
djtriptych 9y ago
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&t=5199 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...
- pinot 9y ago
  It's emacs for numbers.
- wooly_bully 9y ago
  Watching someone who was very adept in Vim keybindings (specifically navigating in visual mode) was impressive the first time. Immediately started learning it that day.
- Balgair 9y ago
  I'm ok with vi, and ol' Martin 'wurmtongue' Shkreli is pretty good, but what is more amazing is that he has people watching him stream. When you try telling your uncle at thanksgiving (who 'dabbles' in finance) that someone like Grimma there would stream his analysts, let alone that people would watch him, they look at you like you have 10 green heads. Shkreli there is a perfect example of a generation gap.
  - cooper12 9y ago
    He has a cult of personality like all scumbags who make money. Everyone will kiss their ass to find out their "secret sauce" when it's usually just exploiting people and general psychopathy. He's a big favorite of the 4chan-types because he makes money while pissing people off and is the embodiment of capitalism.
  - clydethefrog 9y ago
    Not a generation gap. Just the general end conclusion of culture that rewards greed.
- petepete 9y ago
firefoxd 9y ago
Excel is sort of like PHP. The people who want it dead are very vocal. But those who use it, use it to get the job done.
- orwin 9y ago
  (At least php usage allied with miscondonct never made a bank lose 7.2 billions: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/socgen_hack/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/socgen_hack/)
throwaway613834 9y ago
How do finance folks deal with decimals? Doesn't Excel use binary floats? Do they switch to integers?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  What? Excel handles decimals just fine.
  - throwaway613834 9y ago
    > What? Excel handles decimals just fine. I thought it uses binary floats just like any typical computer program? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/78113/floating-point-arithmetic-may-give-inaccurate-results-in-excel https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/78113/floating-poin...
    - dm319 9y ago
      Yes, it doesn't use binary-encoded decimal. I guess the precision is good enough...
      - throwaway613834 9y ago
        If precision was sufficient then so many languages wouldn't put in support for decimal data types, right?
        dm319 9y ago
        Decimal precision isn't so important in modelling. More important in, say, accurate accounting of bitcoins.
  - dmurray 9y ago
    It's an amazingly pervasive myth taught in CS 101 courses that "you should never use floating point types for currencies, or you might go to jail". In reality floats are fine for most financial applications, and for almost all those that would find themselves in a spreadsheet.
bitL 9y ago
With arrogance to irrelevance!
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d--b 9y ago
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 of a spreadsheet, we'll make you a nice system for it, cause your stuff will blow up." - several months later the IT guy comes back with a web app that does the same thing as the spreadsheet. - old trader guy says: "hey I can't copy shit around, my shortcuts aren't working, I need to be able to do basic maths on the side, I can't save my work, etc." - IT guy: "ok I'll make you an export-to-Excel button" Seriously I've seen this happen over and over again. The issue is not how to get rid of Excel, it's how do we make a better spreadsheet...
- djtriptych 9y ago
  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 really offer opportunity for prototyping and running small experiments? Excel is to modeling as wireframing is to UI design. Someone should write a book about productionizing excel models. It's not going away (and shouldn't).
  - d--b 9y ago
    > Someone should write a book 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...
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    - 9y ago
Havoc 9y ago
Told hn exactly that a week ago and got downvoted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15759644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15759644
gjmarsh 9y ago
Finance pros should be careful what they wish for... Refusing to change will give management a great reason to sack them for AI.
- tfolbrecht 9y ago
  I think "management" that think AI will be a viable replacement for financiers should be more afraid of being replaced than "finance pros."
owenversteeg 9y ago
Everyone talks about trying to create a new type of programming environment, something intuitive and visual and that lets you think in new and creative ways. Excel is exactly that. It's easy and nonintimidating to nonprogrammers. It's visual, intuitive, and with a basic understanding of math and an idea of cells you can do a large number of tasks that would otherwise require a program. 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.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  "Everyone talks about trying to create a new type of programming environment, something intuitive and visual and that lets you think in new and creative ways. Excel is exactly that" - yes, it is, except it is a way too old already though all the notable competitors seem dedicating all the efforts to reproducing its legacy as closely as possible. I'd love to see an attempt to design a brand-new spreadsheet from scratch, built around a modern programming language (like Python instead of fossil VBA), modern practical file formats (like HDF5 and SQLite instead of obscure and clumsy xls, xlsx and ods) and all the experience and advances in the UX science accumulated during the recent years. Good news are some projects are heading this way already, e.g. pyspread and jamovi (they can hardly be taketn too serious at this moment but at least they illustrate there are people that see the problems of "classic" spreadhseets and have viable ideas on solving them).
  - clouddrover 9y ago
    How do you mean it's "way too old already"? If it works, it works. You're guaranteed to introduce problems every time you introduce change so there needs to be a strong reason to do. Why change what works?
    - qwerty456127 9y ago
      > How do you mean it's "way too old already" I mean many obvious ways it can be improved have been discovered during the time passed. Although it obviously makes no sense to give up the whole thing just because it has been introduced long ago it still is not a bad idea to consider minor and major improvements or even rethinking the whole idea occasionally. We could still be using good old typewriters/teletypes if the fact they worked was stopping us from thinking about inventing tools to do the same job with less labour and more fun.
blackoil 9y ago
Excel is functional, free form and fast. It ain't going anywhere. MS need to fix multi user workflow and add versioning.
- GFischer 9y ago
  I've heard Excel mentioned as the real reason for the Microsoft Office lock-in and cash cow. Word and PowerPoint can be easily replaced.
  - kerbalspacepro 9y ago
    PowerPoint can't easily be replaced actually... because how it links up with Excel!
Kenji 9y ago
The value of Excel drops rapidly once you learn to program properly. Excel is only valuable for programmers who don't know they're programming. Be aware of what you are doing and be aware of the technical debt you are creating.
umbs 9y ago
Slightly related: NPR's Planet Money ran a show called "Spreadsheets" that gives brief history of Spreadsheets. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/05/17/528807590/episode-606-spreadsheets https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/05/17/528807590/epis... There's a World Championships for Financial Modeling in Excel, it's mentioned in that episode. https://www.modeloff.com/ https://www.modeloff.com/
asofasufb 9y ago
The original article seemed to me basically an advertisement for the companies looking to replace excel. It also included a wonderful vignette where an executive sitting on a plane could check whether laying off his employees would affect his profits. The article was basically a satire disguised as an advertisement disguised as a criticism of excel.
dm319 9y ago
I think this whole thread is too strongly biased to assuming that millions of analysts know what the ideal skills and tools for their job are, rather than they started with Excel and they continued with Excel. The other thing is that people here are comparing moving from Excel to some sort of webapp/db or general purpose language, when actually they should be comparing to numerical computing tools. R is a far more robust tool for numerical computing than Excel. It doesn't hide errors in formulas not copy-pasted enough, or references that have subtly shifted to an unrelated cell, or the garbage data from a sort that missed a few columns. The entry barrier is higher, but for the complex spreadsheets and models we're talking about, the investment in skills is similar.
- cleetus 9y ago
  And RStudio is an incredible IDE that can help ease that transition. My boss is an incredibly smart guy, but he worked in consulting for 15+ years and sometimes cannot view data from outside of an Excel perspective. It can be frustrating to have him think that every problem is a vlookup and pivot table from being solved. I think it's easy to become a bit myopic with Excel. It's like if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
  - dm319 9y ago
    Yes, and after all, it's not as if learning R will prevent you trying out some models in Excel. In a life-time career, a 40-60 hour commitment for a new string to your bow that is as powerful as R is not a big investment.
qwerty456127 9y ago
IMHO all the people who claim having intelligence and education sufficient for a finance job should be able to use at least basic SQL and/or R and/or Q to work with up-to-date information straight from the databases without importing it to a spreadsheet first. Perhaps I am terribly wrong but my intuition suggests entrusting a company finance to a person unable to learn some SQL/R may happen to be a questionable idea.
- rishabhparikh 9y ago
  But... why would they waste time doing that when they COULD just do it in a visual format they're already familiar with? IMO writing excel formulas and having the constant visual feedback is pretty useful and I much prefer it to SQL even though I am very familiar with SQL and not so much with Excel. No need to make an assertion about intelligence and learning programming languages in your comment here either. Everyone has their own workflow.
Havoc 9y ago
Every time I (as a finance supposed "professional") comment on finance article on hn I get downvoted to hell. Note to self - stick to IT stuff when interacting with IT crowd. Yes dear IT crew, in the IT world virtualisation is in this month and docker next and kubernetes the month after. Finance side it's excel as swissknife this year and probably the next 5 years too. Get over it. Anyway - see also djtriptych's post and associated video. Notice the complete lack of macros, programming logic, containerisation, automation, APIs or well really anything hn loves. It's just a digital hybrid scratchpad/calculator with a ton of shortcuts that are muscle memory for everyone. Boggles my mind that HN can understand the whole vim vs emacs wars but not grasp that finance guys like their Excel for the exact same reason. It's disappointingly narrow-minded.
- guitarbill 9y ago
  Not to belabour the editor comparison, but what comes out of an editor is plain text that anybody else can check with any other tool. Excel, not so much. So what's disappointing is the amount of 'finance supposed "professional"' that think that continuing to use Excel is acceptable. For a profession that forces everyone else to dot the i's and cross the t's and leave an auditable trail, unsurprisingly they're willing to let standards slip when it suits them. I'm sure we can rely on them to do the right thing though...
  - NamTaf 9y ago
    I don't necessarily agree with this. If you audit finance, you break open their speadsheets and step through it all. It's even got some basic tools for this - Formulas > Formula Auditing in the ribbon. The spreadsheets become an auditable artifact. Your objection seems to be more that it's proprietary and you can't crack it open with any tool you like. Finance doesn't really care about closed ecosystems though (case in point, Bloomberg).
  - Havoc 9y ago
    >disappointing is the amount of 'finance supposed "professional"' that think that continuing to use Excel is acceptable. Well I'll be sure to hide my Excel when the software Gestapo shows up.
zeep 9y ago
It seems like I've heard that every year for the last 10 years, at least... Who wants to take excel away from them? the same ones that like to change programming language every year?
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
Most people who haven't used Excel for anything more complicated than their tax returns seriously underestimate its capabilities. I've seen people use Excel as essentially a poor (and impatient) man's MATLAB, doing things like surprisingly sophisticated and responsive, albeit low-resolution, physics simulations.
- analog31 9y ago
  Indeed, I've seen people who were power users in the more sophisticated computational software, yet still used Excel when they found it to be useful. The hard thing for me in Excel is visualizing the data flow. Long ago I wrote a VBA macro that would return the formula contents of a cell, and I'd just put that next to each formula cell. That way, I could see what all of the formulas were doing. My sheets were hideous, but if I was working through something complicated, it helped me troubleshoot mistakes. I now prefer Jupyter/Python, but still can't claim that it's quicker for the smallest jobs.
rbc 9y ago
It’s as likely as them giving up their HP-12Cs.
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known 9y ago
My brother, a Business Analyst implements the prototype in Excel and hands it over to engineering team to develop it in SQL.
slowmovintarget 9y ago
Let them eat Emacs?
ilkan 9y ago
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 and immediately export to excel from a terminal at 5pm, or be charged an extra 200K a year for the overnight deluxe data export package and still not get the same bond valuation you need to reconcile. (looking at you, Bloomberg!). 3. Every rockstar portfolio manager has their own models, and not even the VP of IT dares tell them what to use. There's no "bog-standard model" that everyone uses. That's the expensive PM's edge. 4. Speed. Requirements, test cases, test server, scheduling personnel, project planning, testing, promotion to prod, signoff, takes a month for trivial stuff if you're lucky. Trading opportunity long gone. Analysts grab a spreadsheet, do it in half a day, make or reject the trade. 5. Capability. Pivot tables. Compact, resizeable, color-coded, read/writeable grid, notations on the side, instant recalc, reorientable text. Row inserts. Printing. Ugh. 6. Risk. Analyst does the spreadsheet, IT hands are clean. "Not our fault if you screw up". 7. Resumes. What developer wants to spend 10 years coding models and reports that are regularly modified or discarded with each new analyst and PM's whim? 8. Time. FO spends 16 hours a day trading or researching under immense stress. Asking them to find, let alone spend, 2 hours a day explaining workflows to devs is... unrealistic. 9. Education. Devs know development, not financial instruments and regs. SME's who understand both software design and finance are rare and expensive therefore used on major projects. This may hurt egos here but most devs are some combination of untrained/low social sensitivity/ESL/fragile egos/tend to start explaining a solution instead of first listening to the problem. Devs do major dev stuff where it's warranted. Analysts can keep Excel where it's not.
- UK-AL 9y ago
  "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.
znpy 9y ago
Since were all finally praising Excel for the marvel it is, I think it's also time for the OSS community to realize and acknowledge that OpenOffice/LibreOffice is quite crappy and should really see some serious improvement. Calc is basically a toy compared to Excel, and this is quite evident once you step out of the basic things. Anecdotally: a while ago i wanted to live-update a cell in my spreadsheet using python . Nothing fancy, just update the cell with the latest price of bitcoins and see if it's time to sell (at the time bitcoin was at 500$). I wasted a morning on that thing and I managed to get it working but oh boy I am so ashamed of the code i wrote... Also OpenOffice/LibreOffice APIs are arcane and basically undocumented. Examples are basically non-existing.
- ccozan 9y ago
  I actually abandoned all Libre/Openoffice and I moved on Google Sheets. The number of add-ons is growing and I enjoy working in the collaborative mode with my partner.
- woliveirajr 9y ago
  so, if it didn't work and you gave up selling your bitcoins, it more than paid your work.
prepend 9y ago
I have a smart colleague of mine who has a story about “How Excel Saved the World.” He talks about how Excel was used so extensively during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, it was the most responsible software for analyzing data to stop the spread of the disease. Excel certainly has limitations, but it has many features and is widely used.
teilo 9y ago
I'm surprised the use of BI tools that integrate with Excel has not come up in this discussion. For example, Oracle EssBase (part of Hyperion) is comparatively inexpensive, and it is used in Excel via their SmartView plugin. You get all the power of Excel with live data, and flexible data models driven by an OLAP datastore. It has revolutionized our month-end and commissions process (now takes a fraction of the time), while still allowing the flexibility of Excel.
hjalmarg 9y ago
The world - rightfully - has a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. As many of the comments here point out, it is a much more nuanced subject than the referenced article suggests. For those interested in a little deeper dive I recently wrote this three-part blog series on the origin and nature of spreadsheets: - Spreadsheets are programs: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-about-spreadsheets-part-1-7dfd6b3759cb https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou... - Spreadsheets made the PC market: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-about-spreadsheets-part-2-43a4fb7b6a45 https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou... - Spreadsheets are everywhere: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-about-spreadsheets-part-3-eed2162d0628 https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou...
danzig13 9y ago
Excel+PowerQuery is and will continue to be the most capable and accessible scratch pad people use. That is: get data out of your central system(s), crunch it in Excel, feed the results back to your central system and reference the spreadsheet as a record of your calculations. The big problem is when people promote it to collaboration and workflow management software.

290 points by triplee 9y ago

osullivj 9y ago

Yes - Excel is deeply embedded in actuarial modelling.

triplee 9y ago
Modeling yes, which makes sense given that it's a tabular math tool. Using it to handle all the pricing structure for a few thousand clients on the other hand is another issue by having underwriters plug in values that they got from an online application, though, not so much.
- throw_away54321 9y ago
  This sounds familiar...

siruncledrew 9y ago

Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files, why else would someone be compelled to stick with Excel? Seems like the rest of the tabular data stuff could be done in Google Sheets or some other product and yield the same results.

therealidiot 9y ago
Google Sheets kinda sucks performance-wise though
triplee 9y ago
It's on everyone's computer in the office, and doesn't require internet or training outside of your non-tech specialty. Also, there's a TON of .xlsx files in the wild with years of business knowledge and processing. Everyone uses about the same 50% or so of Excel, which is captured in Google Sheets and any other spreadsheet. It's the extra 20% that everyone else uses -- and it's a different 20% for everyone -- that causes the issue of entrenchment.
noobhacker 9y ago
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.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Google sheets has a vastly inferior performance and feature set, trying to chalk that up as "psychological / political reasons" is pure spin.
- sevensor 9y ago
  I disagree. For users who aren't going to make the leap to "real" programming, spreadsheets are a huge boon. Excel is the only thing many domain experts can use to turn their knowledge into a computational model. Sure, there are tons of problems compared to models implemented in general-purpose programming languages, and we love to complain about the atrocities committed in Excel, but nobody's yet managed to devise an alternative with the same low barrier to entry.
  - itomato 9y ago
    Spreadsheets are a huge risk to everyone, especially those who haven't made the leap to "real" programming. Excel, 1-2-3, Visicalc are, taxonomically speaking, in the same class. We have a new order of tools. While they have their own inherent risks, they reflect literally decades of thinking about the risks and limitations of tools whose lineage traces back to Visicalc. Macro management and security, versioning, distributed access, multidimensionality; all are addressed in a handful of ways with Alpha, Tableau, Looker and other progressive tools. Excel, floppies, line printers; relics.
  - noobhacker 9y ago
    I agree 100% that Excel is best for people who aren't going to make the leap#. My point is that domain experts should* make the leap to "real" programming, especially R to handle data analysis. Excel is faster to get started. But for advanced tasks, the time it takes to learn Excel / R is about the same. A big reason why people don't make the leap is because they already spent too much time becoming an Excel expert. Indeed, for young analysts with no baggage, a lot of people learn and use R instead.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Aside from macros, keyboard shortcuts, and .xlsx files Those things. I literally run and pay for Parallels on my Mac for the Windows version of Excel. (Mostly for the keyboard shortcuts.)
TimPC 9y ago
That's a pretty big aside. Like big enough to be a valid reason in and of itself. The other part is performance and interface lag which still tends to be an issue on any reasonable amount of data.
berberous 9y ago
Why use VIM, emacs or Sublime Text, when some online cloud coding platform can probably do the same thing? In addition to the things you mentioned, Excel is an offline, native app, with much more speed and efficiency when dealing with complex or large spreadsheets, IMO.
rb808 9y ago
Excel is a proper gui, Sheets is remarkable achievement in javascript but sucks to use for more than light work. Even editing a few cells in Google Sheets is fiddly.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
En_gr_Student 9y ago
It is called "technical debt" and "organizational momentum". What do you do to stop a few million person-years of investment in a toolset without loss of value? ... usually, nothing much. This is one reason that new OS and new Office versions also raise substantial ire in those same folks. There are semiconductor fabs running most of their machinery on Windows XP for the foreseeable future.
- newman8r 9y ago
  and don't tell them if their equipment pops up on shodan unless you want an accusatory tone and questions relating to you being a "hacker"
kgwgk 9y ago
VBA, forms, integration with data sources... "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
allenz 9y ago
The main reason is that Excel has features for professionals, but another reason is that some companies don't want Google to have access to their data.
DanBC 9y ago
I love other spreadsheets. I use a few of them. My first was Lotus 123. But Excel is used because it's very very good. Many of the people use it need this one small weird thing, and Excel has it and none of the others do yet. And that one small weird thing is different for everyone. It's a bit scary to see how much stuff is kept going with scary hairballs of VBA and macros and god-knows-what. The EUSPRIG has more information. For example, this about spreadsheets in clinical medicine: http://www.eusprig.org/2006/spreadsheets-in-clinical-medicine-warning.pdf http://www.eusprig.org/2006/spreadsheets-in-clinical-medicin...
IncRnd 9y ago
You can pull in data from other sources, your business data is on your company NAS not unencrypted somewhere in the cloud, Excel is faster for real-world volumes of data, group policy & management functions, etc.
shostack 9y ago
Not sure why you got downvoted as this is a fair question. I use both on a daily basis. Our org is on the Google Apps for Business stack which is why I use Google Sheets, but I'm considering getting us on Office 365 for the collaboration capabilities of Google Sheets paired with the functionality and advanced features of Excel. Simply put, Excel can do way more, is faster, and frankly, takes less time to do things in because I'm deeply familiar with it from years of repetition and troubleshooting. There's also WAAAY more documentation and tutorials available for it when you do encounter a problem.

rabboRubble 9y ago

The issue in finance is the speed of change in demands. No formalized system platform with proper change control can keep up. The ability to play with data, the ability to break your work is valuable in end user computing and the type of thing that is hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits. edit: I entire a whole.

rapht 9y ago
This - exactly
guitarbill 9y ago
> hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits. This should also be the reason for getting rid of Excel, it is basically inauditable. But then again I guess all the auditing firms (e.g. Deloitte, KPMG, EY) probably have a vested interest in keeping it that way, not to mention all the persons who use this deniability for fudging numbers. I guess we'll always have ethics to fall back on /s
- rabboRubble 9y ago
  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 tight development cycle controls. Typically the bankers have low risk tolerances and their systems (ex. savings and payment client account ledger systems, ATM ops, etc.) reflect it. That said, even in a true banking company, the closer the department is to the interest rating trading operations the more the banking environment looks like a securities operation. You will find critical on-the-fly modeling taking place, data integration, data reintegration all happening in Excel spreadsheets and these XLSX will be driving business decisions. In securities operations the pace of change (demands originating from regulatory bodies, external clients, and internal trading operation, etc.) inevitably push the boundaries of what the bankers can support. If your securities side regulatory body says the firm must implement X in order to report Y, the firm is obligated to do it, regardless of what banking IT risk and change control framework the bank thinks should be followed. If the regulatory body says X should be in place by Z date, and banking assessment / change control procedures can not be finished by Z date, guess what X gets implemented by Z date. There is no choice. Same goes for client system demands. Woe be the IT staff who tries to tell a securities side broker their client demand can not be fulfilled by some change control / risk assessment procedure. Do such a thing enough and the desk's profitability will take a hit. Which means the trader's bonus will take a hit. Which means IT will take a hit. If a proprietary / quant / interest rate trader can't respond quickly enough to market change X because it took 3 days for a revised real time report to be created and then vetted by a formal change management process, the IT staff pushing those processes will be replaced. Looking at the situation another way, having these time sensitive demands in Excel instead of in trading systems is actually kind of smart. Try to integrate the rapid trading desk decision making that happens in Excel into the trading / transaction ledger / transaction settlement system will just endanger the smooth operation of the those systems. Fewer changes the better in these core systems.

justboxing 9y ago

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 the lan, security reasons), is blazing fast, and helps them make money and generate profits for the company. I've seen very sophisticated OMSs (Order Management Systems) built completely using excel workbooks, with 1 sheet containing orders and formula's to pull realtime pricing from bloomberg, reuters, another sheet for pre-trade analysis, another for the actual trades, and a summary sheet with pivot tables and charts to show the trade progress and summary. As and when the last_price changes, the formulas update, so the trader is looking at a real-time view of his situation. 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. I know devs hate Excel, in part, because you are the "IT guy" they call (been there many times) when the spreadsheet gets out of hand, or slows down, or keeps crashing excel after a certain inflection point.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Someone on HN said this once, and I found it profound and have stolen it: Excel is the most powerful REPL in the finance industry, and it's ubiquitous.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
maxxxxx 9y ago
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. They clearly illustrate the disconnect between end users and IT/devs in many companies.

natural219 9y ago

Wasn't http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ supposed to solve this? I love Chris Granger and his team, but at this point he seems inclined to pivot ideas every 2-3 years, instead of following through with an industry-workable solution to some of these programming problems... See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...

bpicolo 9y ago
That's not similar at all though. When you're working with rows/columns of numbers, the sort of tabular data people are working with, excel is an insanely efficient UI solution. Widget based solutions can't compete with that.
- natural219 9y ago
  I was talking about thing he was working on in 2014 - 2015, which his website described as: > On the surface, Eve is an environment a little like Excel that allows you to ‘program’ simply by moving columns and rows around in tables. Under the covers it’s a powerful database, a temporal logic language, and a flexible IDE [Integrated Development Environment] that allows you to build anything from a simple website to complex algorithms. Now, I guess they're doing something completely different.

j_s 9y ago

One interesting aspect of Excel is how a sheet can be shared in a way that a compiled executable can not. Even with all the various viruses floating around, opening a spreadsheet is a common and allowed task as opposed to downloading, installing, and running software. Edit: I suppose this point is mostly about the ubiquity of Excel as a platform. The interesting thing to me was that even otherwise prorietary models are more accessible distributed as Excel sheets than better-secured inside a custom tool.

saagarjha 9y ago
Well, Excel is interpreted, so a better comparison would be made against interpreted languages…
- j_s 9y ago
  Few are willing to run random programs in interpreted languages. Most wouldn't have the required runtime(s), and things like PowerShell have a stigma that an .XLSX does not.
  - PurpleRamen 9y ago
    Everyone has a javascript-interpreter installed.
    - j_s 9y ago
      If you are talking about the browser, they are all locked down to prevent JavaScript execution from local files. If you are talking about WScript on Windows (I doubt it), it has an even worse reputation than PowerShell.
      - PurpleRamen 9y ago
        Yes, browser. Are you talking about Same-Origin-Policy? This shouldn't prevent a script being executed local. It only limits what it can do. Because of security, there is heavy sandboxing with javascript. Anyway, it wouldn't be hard to transform browsers in full fledged local scripting-engines, without dismanteling security.

djtriptych 9y ago

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&t=5199 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...

pinot 9y ago
It's emacs for numbers.
wooly_bully 9y ago
Watching someone who was very adept in Vim keybindings (specifically navigating in visual mode) was impressive the first time. Immediately started learning it that day.
Balgair 9y ago
I'm ok with vi, and ol' Martin 'wurmtongue' Shkreli is pretty good, but what is more amazing is that he has people watching him stream. When you try telling your uncle at thanksgiving (who 'dabbles' in finance) that someone like Grimma there would stream his analysts, let alone that people would watch him, they look at you like you have 10 green heads. Shkreli there is a perfect example of a generation gap.
- cooper12 9y ago
  He has a cult of personality like all scumbags who make money. Everyone will kiss their ass to find out their "secret sauce" when it's usually just exploiting people and general psychopathy. He's a big favorite of the 4chan-types because he makes money while pissing people off and is the embodiment of capitalism.
- clydethefrog 9y ago
  Not a generation gap. Just the general end conclusion of culture that rewards greed.
petepete 9y ago

firefoxd 9y ago

Excel is sort of like PHP. The people who want it dead are very vocal. But those who use it, use it to get the job done.

orwin 9y ago
(At least php usage allied with miscondonct never made a bank lose 7.2 billions: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/socgen_hack/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/30/socgen_hack/)

throwaway613834 9y ago

How do finance folks deal with decimals? Doesn't Excel use binary floats? Do they switch to integers?

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
What? Excel handles decimals just fine.
- throwaway613834 9y ago
  > What? Excel handles decimals just fine. I thought it uses binary floats just like any typical computer program? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/78113/floating-point-arithmetic-may-give-inaccurate-results-in-excel https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/78113/floating-poin...
  - dm319 9y ago
    Yes, it doesn't use binary-encoded decimal. I guess the precision is good enough...
    - throwaway613834 9y ago
      If precision was sufficient then so many languages wouldn't put in support for decimal data types, right?
      - dm319 9y ago
        Decimal precision isn't so important in modelling. More important in, say, accurate accounting of bitcoins.
- dmurray 9y ago
  It's an amazingly pervasive myth taught in CS 101 courses that "you should never use floating point types for currencies, or you might go to jail". In reality floats are fine for most financial applications, and for almost all those that would find themselves in a spreadsheet.

bitL 9y ago

With arrogance to irrelevance!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

d--b 9y ago

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 of a spreadsheet, we'll make you a nice system for it, cause your stuff will blow up." - several months later the IT guy comes back with a web app that does the same thing as the spreadsheet. - old trader guy says: "hey I can't copy shit around, my shortcuts aren't working, I need to be able to do basic maths on the side, I can't save my work, etc." - IT guy: "ok I'll make you an export-to-Excel button" Seriously I've seen this happen over and over again. The issue is not how to get rid of Excel, it's how do we make a better spreadsheet...

djtriptych 9y ago
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 really offer opportunity for prototyping and running small experiments? Excel is to modeling as wireframing is to UI design. Someone should write a book about productionizing excel models. It's not going away (and shouldn't).
- d--b 9y ago
  > Someone should write a book 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...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9y ago

Havoc 9y ago

Told hn exactly that a week ago and got downvoted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15759644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15759644

gjmarsh 9y ago

Finance pros should be careful what they wish for... Refusing to change will give management a great reason to sack them for AI.

tfolbrecht 9y ago
I think "management" that think AI will be a viable replacement for financiers should be more afraid of being replaced than "finance pros."

owenversteeg 9y ago

Everyone talks about trying to create a new type of programming environment, something intuitive and visual and that lets you think in new and creative ways. Excel is exactly that. It's easy and nonintimidating to nonprogrammers. It's visual, intuitive, and with a basic understanding of math and an idea of cells you can do a large number of tasks that would otherwise require a program. 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.

qwerty456127 9y ago
"Everyone talks about trying to create a new type of programming environment, something intuitive and visual and that lets you think in new and creative ways. Excel is exactly that" - yes, it is, except it is a way too old already though all the notable competitors seem dedicating all the efforts to reproducing its legacy as closely as possible. I'd love to see an attempt to design a brand-new spreadsheet from scratch, built around a modern programming language (like Python instead of fossil VBA), modern practical file formats (like HDF5 and SQLite instead of obscure and clumsy xls, xlsx and ods) and all the experience and advances in the UX science accumulated during the recent years. Good news are some projects are heading this way already, e.g. pyspread and jamovi (they can hardly be taketn too serious at this moment but at least they illustrate there are people that see the problems of "classic" spreadhseets and have viable ideas on solving them).
- clouddrover 9y ago
  How do you mean it's "way too old already"? If it works, it works. You're guaranteed to introduce problems every time you introduce change so there needs to be a strong reason to do. Why change what works?
  - qwerty456127 9y ago
    > How do you mean it's "way too old already" I mean many obvious ways it can be improved have been discovered during the time passed. Although it obviously makes no sense to give up the whole thing just because it has been introduced long ago it still is not a bad idea to consider minor and major improvements or even rethinking the whole idea occasionally. We could still be using good old typewriters/teletypes if the fact they worked was stopping us from thinking about inventing tools to do the same job with less labour and more fun.

blackoil 9y ago

Excel is functional, free form and fast. It ain't going anywhere. MS need to fix multi user workflow and add versioning.

GFischer 9y ago
I've heard Excel mentioned as the real reason for the Microsoft Office lock-in and cash cow. Word and PowerPoint can be easily replaced.
- kerbalspacepro 9y ago
  PowerPoint can't easily be replaced actually... because how it links up with Excel!

Kenji 9y ago

The value of Excel drops rapidly once you learn to program properly. Excel is only valuable for programmers who don't know they're programming. Be aware of what you are doing and be aware of the technical debt you are creating.

umbs 9y ago

Slightly related: NPR's Planet Money ran a show called "Spreadsheets" that gives brief history of Spreadsheets. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/05/17/528807590/episode-606-spreadsheets https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/05/17/528807590/epis... There's a World Championships for Financial Modeling in Excel, it's mentioned in that episode. https://www.modeloff.com/ https://www.modeloff.com/

asofasufb 9y ago

The original article seemed to me basically an advertisement for the companies looking to replace excel. It also included a wonderful vignette where an executive sitting on a plane could check whether laying off his employees would affect his profits. The article was basically a satire disguised as an advertisement disguised as a criticism of excel.

dm319 9y ago

I think this whole thread is too strongly biased to assuming that millions of analysts know what the ideal skills and tools for their job are, rather than they started with Excel and they continued with Excel. The other thing is that people here are comparing moving from Excel to some sort of webapp/db or general purpose language, when actually they should be comparing to numerical computing tools. R is a far more robust tool for numerical computing than Excel. It doesn't hide errors in formulas not copy-pasted enough, or references that have subtly shifted to an unrelated cell, or the garbage data from a sort that missed a few columns. The entry barrier is higher, but for the complex spreadsheets and models we're talking about, the investment in skills is similar.

cleetus 9y ago
And RStudio is an incredible IDE that can help ease that transition. My boss is an incredibly smart guy, but he worked in consulting for 15+ years and sometimes cannot view data from outside of an Excel perspective. It can be frustrating to have him think that every problem is a vlookup and pivot table from being solved. I think it's easy to become a bit myopic with Excel. It's like if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
- dm319 9y ago
  Yes, and after all, it's not as if learning R will prevent you trying out some models in Excel. In a life-time career, a 40-60 hour commitment for a new string to your bow that is as powerful as R is not a big investment.

qwerty456127 9y ago

IMHO all the people who claim having intelligence and education sufficient for a finance job should be able to use at least basic SQL and/or R and/or Q to work with up-to-date information straight from the databases without importing it to a spreadsheet first. Perhaps I am terribly wrong but my intuition suggests entrusting a company finance to a person unable to learn some SQL/R may happen to be a questionable idea.

rishabhparikh 9y ago
But... why would they waste time doing that when they COULD just do it in a visual format they're already familiar with? IMO writing excel formulas and having the constant visual feedback is pretty useful and I much prefer it to SQL even though I am very familiar with SQL and not so much with Excel. No need to make an assertion about intelligence and learning programming languages in your comment here either. Everyone has their own workflow.

Havoc 9y ago

Every time I (as a finance supposed "professional") comment on finance article on hn I get downvoted to hell. Note to self - stick to IT stuff when interacting with IT crowd. Yes dear IT crew, in the IT world virtualisation is in this month and docker next and kubernetes the month after. Finance side it's excel as swissknife this year and probably the next 5 years too. Get over it. Anyway - see also djtriptych's post and associated video. Notice the complete lack of macros, programming logic, containerisation, automation, APIs or well really anything hn loves. It's just a digital hybrid scratchpad/calculator with a ton of shortcuts that are muscle memory for everyone. Boggles my mind that HN can understand the whole vim vs emacs wars but not grasp that finance guys like their Excel for the exact same reason. It's disappointingly narrow-minded.

guitarbill 9y ago
Not to belabour the editor comparison, but what comes out of an editor is plain text that anybody else can check with any other tool. Excel, not so much. So what's disappointing is the amount of 'finance supposed "professional"' that think that continuing to use Excel is acceptable. For a profession that forces everyone else to dot the i's and cross the t's and leave an auditable trail, unsurprisingly they're willing to let standards slip when it suits them. I'm sure we can rely on them to do the right thing though...
- NamTaf 9y ago
  I don't necessarily agree with this. If you audit finance, you break open their speadsheets and step through it all. It's even got some basic tools for this - Formulas > Formula Auditing in the ribbon. The spreadsheets become an auditable artifact. Your objection seems to be more that it's proprietary and you can't crack it open with any tool you like. Finance doesn't really care about closed ecosystems though (case in point, Bloomberg).
- Havoc 9y ago
  >disappointing is the amount of 'finance supposed "professional"' that think that continuing to use Excel is acceptable. Well I'll be sure to hide my Excel when the software Gestapo shows up.

zeep 9y ago

It seems like I've heard that every year for the last 10 years, at least... Who wants to take excel away from them? the same ones that like to change programming language every year?

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

Most people who haven't used Excel for anything more complicated than their tax returns seriously underestimate its capabilities. I've seen people use Excel as essentially a poor (and impatient) man's MATLAB, doing things like surprisingly sophisticated and responsive, albeit low-resolution, physics simulations.

analog31 9y ago
Indeed, I've seen people who were power users in the more sophisticated computational software, yet still used Excel when they found it to be useful. The hard thing for me in Excel is visualizing the data flow. Long ago I wrote a VBA macro that would return the formula contents of a cell, and I'd just put that next to each formula cell. That way, I could see what all of the formulas were doing. My sheets were hideous, but if I was working through something complicated, it helped me troubleshoot mistakes. I now prefer Jupyter/Python, but still can't claim that it's quicker for the smallest jobs.

rbc 9y ago

It’s as likely as them giving up their HP-12Cs.

deleted 9y ago

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known 9y ago

My brother, a Business Analyst implements the prototype in Excel and hands it over to engineering team to develop it in SQL.

slowmovintarget 9y ago

Let them eat Emacs?

ilkan 9y ago

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 and immediately export to excel from a terminal at 5pm, or be charged an extra 200K a year for the overnight deluxe data export package and still not get the same bond valuation you need to reconcile. (looking at you, Bloomberg!). 3. Every rockstar portfolio manager has their own models, and not even the VP of IT dares tell them what to use. There's no "bog-standard model" that everyone uses. That's the expensive PM's edge. 4. Speed. Requirements, test cases, test server, scheduling personnel, project planning, testing, promotion to prod, signoff, takes a month for trivial stuff if you're lucky. Trading opportunity long gone. Analysts grab a spreadsheet, do it in half a day, make or reject the trade. 5. Capability. Pivot tables. Compact, resizeable, color-coded, read/writeable grid, notations on the side, instant recalc, reorientable text. Row inserts. Printing. Ugh. 6. Risk. Analyst does the spreadsheet, IT hands are clean. "Not our fault if you screw up". 7. Resumes. What developer wants to spend 10 years coding models and reports that are regularly modified or discarded with each new analyst and PM's whim? 8. Time. FO spends 16 hours a day trading or researching under immense stress. Asking them to find, let alone spend, 2 hours a day explaining workflows to devs is... unrealistic. 9. Education. Devs know development, not financial instruments and regs. SME's who understand both software design and finance are rare and expensive therefore used on major projects. This may hurt egos here but most devs are some combination of untrained/low social sensitivity/ESL/fragile egos/tend to start explaining a solution instead of first listening to the problem. Devs do major dev stuff where it's warranted. Analysts can keep Excel where it's not.

UK-AL 9y ago
"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.

znpy 9y ago

Since were all finally praising Excel for the marvel it is, I think it's also time for the OSS community to realize and acknowledge that OpenOffice/LibreOffice is quite crappy and should really see some serious improvement. Calc is basically a toy compared to Excel, and this is quite evident once you step out of the basic things. Anecdotally: a while ago i wanted to live-update a cell in my spreadsheet using python . Nothing fancy, just update the cell with the latest price of bitcoins and see if it's time to sell (at the time bitcoin was at 500$). I wasted a morning on that thing and I managed to get it working but oh boy I am so ashamed of the code i wrote... Also OpenOffice/LibreOffice APIs are arcane and basically undocumented. Examples are basically non-existing.

ccozan 9y ago
I actually abandoned all Libre/Openoffice and I moved on Google Sheets. The number of add-ons is growing and I enjoy working in the collaborative mode with my partner.
woliveirajr 9y ago
so, if it didn't work and you gave up selling your bitcoins, it more than paid your work.

prepend 9y ago

I have a smart colleague of mine who has a story about “How Excel Saved the World.” He talks about how Excel was used so extensively during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, it was the most responsible software for analyzing data to stop the spread of the disease. Excel certainly has limitations, but it has many features and is widely used.

teilo 9y ago

I'm surprised the use of BI tools that integrate with Excel has not come up in this discussion. For example, Oracle EssBase (part of Hyperion) is comparatively inexpensive, and it is used in Excel via their SmartView plugin. You get all the power of Excel with live data, and flexible data models driven by an OLAP datastore. It has revolutionized our month-end and commissions process (now takes a fraction of the time), while still allowing the flexibility of Excel.

hjalmarg 9y ago

The world - rightfully - has a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. As many of the comments here point out, it is a much more nuanced subject than the referenced article suggests. For those interested in a little deeper dive I recently wrote this three-part blog series on the origin and nature of spreadsheets: - Spreadsheets are programs: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-about-spreadsheets-part-1-7dfd6b3759cb https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou... - Spreadsheets made the PC market: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-about-spreadsheets-part-2-43a4fb7b6a45 https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou... - Spreadsheets are everywhere: https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-about-spreadsheets-part-3-eed2162d0628 https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-abou...

danzig13 9y ago

Excel+PowerQuery is and will continue to be the most capable and accessible scratch pad people use. That is: get data out of your central system(s), crunch it in Excel, feed the results back to your central system and reference the spreadsheet as a record of your calculations. The big problem is when people promote it to collaboration and workflow management software.