So I do a lot of backward looking analysis and forward looking planning. All my reusable models are SQL based. I am certainly a top user in terms of intersectio

So I do a lot of backward looking analysis and forward looking planning. All my reusable models are SQL based. I am certainly a top user in terms of intersection of database, programming and financial modelling. I meet almost no FP&A persons doing what I do. But I still reach for Excel for exploration. And I also share these explorations with clients in Excel. Why? Because when you are exploring, you don't yet know the domain. There is no value in saving and building upon top of that kind of data. "What if" questions from clients are ephemeral. My pile of scratch pad queries is absolutely enormous. I don't need or want any of that stuff cluttering up my data sources. My biggest challenge in complex analysis is keeping track of all of the branches and data lineage of the complexity of the models. Knowing what some metric I created "means" and if or how it can be used properly by something else.