In a past life I've made extensive use of the q/kdb excel plugin to do my financial analysis (backtesting, model fitting etc). The basic setup was: 1. set up

In a past life I've made extensive use of the q/kdb excel plugin to do my financial analysis (backtesting, model fitting etc). The basic setup was: 1. set up a q server and load lots of price data and signal tables in memory 2. open a connection to the server from your spreadsheet 3. write q queries in excel directly. Because q is so compact you could essentially write a (quite long) one line aproximate backtester, as long as your q server stored daily prices, volumes, advs etc in a sensible way. The spreadsheet form factor was pretty good - it was nice to be able to plot arbitrary series and generally made it quite fast to work with data. It was by no means perfect, but I found it infinitely better than setups like jupyter notebooks.