
Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands - triplee
https://www.wsj.com/articles/finance-pros-say-youll-have-to-pry-excel-out-of-their-cold-dead-hands-1512060948
======
d--b
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...

~~~
btilly
At a former job I had to build a reporting system. And had the trust to build
it however I wanted. But it was my job to make it sufficiently useful that
everyone would use it.

The smartest thing that I did was make it accessible from Excel. You could
build a spreadsheet off of my report. Refresh the spreadsheet, the report ran,
you got updated data.

I got essentially 100% adoption, and the rest of my job was spent finding
people who needed data and adding it as an option to the reporting system.

Usually you expect a complex reporting system to have features like graphing,
pivot tables, etc, etc, etc. My answer to all of that was, "You can already do
that in Excel. I could spend a lot of time on it but I'm not going to do it as
well as what you already have."

~~~
sdrinf
This sounds an incredibly useful capability to have. May I ask which data
connector did you used to pull data, and how did you made it available in that
format from the app side?

~~~
emidln
Excel has a feature for pulling data stored in HTML tables into a sheet called
"Web Queries"[0]. It also has a feature for automatically building these in
the form of .iqy files. When I worked at Abbott Labs, it was a big deal to be
able to offer export-to-Excel in a way that Excel could refresh automatically
(or manually). This made it a breeze since we could register an .iqy
serializer for a dataset and just give a download link to it in place of a
CSV, JSON, or XML file.

[0] [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Get-external-
data-f...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Get-external-data-from-a-
Web-page-708f2249-9569-4ff9-a8a4-7ee5f1b1cfba)

~~~
btilly
That was exactly how I did it. The only major downside was that I had to be
sure to keep the html consistent, and couldn't require login.

Since it was a system for internal use, that was deemed acceptable.

------
djtriptych
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be&t=5199)

~~~
Balgair
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.

~~~
clydethefrog
Not a generation gap. Just the general end conclusion of culture that rewards
greed.

------
rabboRubble
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.

~~~
guitarbill
> 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
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.

~~~
cm2187
And I am sure that like me, you have witnessed multiple production systems
used for critical missions that are simply too old or expensive to update, or
that have been marked legacy but never replaced. These systems are as
problematic as spreadsheets.

~~~
rabboRubble
Yep!

These ancient systems are one more reason why Excel spreasheets exist. The
Excel file backfills missing functionality in the ancient system to permit the
end user to do their job as defined some 30-40 years after the legacy system
first came online!

------
owenversteeg
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
"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
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
> 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.

------
ilkan
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
"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.

~~~
notyourday
Fund manager: profit

Developer: overhead

If you do not believe me, go _ask your manager_.

It is not different from food service

Customer => profit

Restaurant staff => overhead

The job of overhead is to enable making of _profit_. Without profit, developer
would be out of a job. Without developer, fund manager will not be out of a
job - he would be using Excel.

~~~
UK-AL
Exactly, it's not negative personality traits that makes developers less
influential. It's their role.

------
firefoxd
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
(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/))

------
dm319
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
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
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.

------
znpy
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
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.

------
umbs
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/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/05/17/528807590/episode-606-spreadsheets)

There's a World Championships for Financial Modeling in Excel, it's mentioned
in that episode.

[https://www.modeloff.com/](https://www.modeloff.com/)

------
j_s
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
Well, Excel is interpreted, so a better comparison would be made against
interpreted languages…

~~~
j_s
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
Everyone has a javascript-interpreter installed.

~~~
j_s
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
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.

------
0xcde4c3db
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
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.

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

~~~
GFischer
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
PowerPoint can't easily be replaced actually... because how it links up with
Excel!

------
osullivj
Yes - Excel is deeply embedded in actuarial modelling.

~~~
triplee
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.

------
natural219
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/savin...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-
the-world-from-code/540393/)

~~~
bpicolo
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
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.

------
teilo
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
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-abou...](https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-
about-spreadsheets-part-1-7dfd6b3759cb)

\- Spreadsheets made the PC market: [https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-
dont-understand-abou...](https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-
understand-about-spreadsheets-part-2-43a4fb7b6a45)

\- Spreadsheets are everywhere: [https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-
understand-abou...](https://medium.com/@hjalli/3-things-you-dont-understand-
about-spreadsheets-part-3-eed2162d0628)

------
zeep
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?

------
danzig13
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.

------
prepend
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.

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

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

------
siruncledrew
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.

~~~
noobhacker
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.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Have you ever been a power user of Microsoft Excel? And then tried to
replicate that functionality in Google Sheets?

Or is your aversion mostly to the M- word?

I find it funny that when it comes to vi vs emacs (or any such similarly geek-
approved thing), fans of each will jump up in arms about the precise reason
their platform is better, but the same kind of people would not want to take
hundreds of thousands of business professionals at their word about why they
like using a particular piece of software.

~~~
michaelmrose
Probably because the geeks can consider the virtues of making a spreadsheet vs
an application while the office workers are incapable of understanding more
than half the equation.

Also office workers can't always be trusted to even plug things in let alone
properly assess what an optimal solution looks like.

~~~
vilmosi
Geeks aren't as smart as they think they are. Particularly when it comes to
business requirements. I'm guilty of that as much as anyone.

------
slowmovintarget
Let them eat Emacs?

------
justboxing
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.

~~~
alecco
> 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.

Sorry but I have to call nonsense on that part. I've seen recently a whole
trading operation converted to a system very close to a web app within 6
months. The hard part of the job was untangling the mess they created. And
knowledgeable quants who actually program told us it's typical.

The financial pros have horrible, horrible stuff in their spreadsheets. They
are used to it and they want (perhaps unconsciously) to keep their dirty hacks
out of sight. Lest they fall from heaven.

~~~
EpicEng
Except excel is a generic solution. If you have to build a specific solution
for each processes your costs skyrocket and people lose the ability to quickly
implement something on their own. Everything takes forever to get done because
you're constantly haggling with development and writing requirements instead
of just opening excel and getting work done.

~~~
mulmen
I've never seen two consistently created Excel workbooks. There is a lot of
wheel inventing going on in the Excel world. It's possible that a more formal
system would have less duplicated effort. It's also possible that doesn't
matter.

"Everything takes forever because you have to write requirements" is a feature
of software development. At the end you get software that does something that
you (presumably) understand. Excel is a gold mine of undocumented terms,
processes and functionality.

It's fast to build but don't pretend it gives any of the benefits of proper
software development processes. The value proposition is in fact that it has
none of those guarantees.

~~~
bkor
> There is a lot of wheel inventing going on in the Excel world.

There's usually more people who know Excel than people who can create systems.
Meaning, the inefficiency is not that important. Some things just cannot wait
or depend on a much smaller amount of people.

~~~
mulmen
On the other hand I spent a lot of time as a data analyst explaining to
business folks who "know excel" that their spreadsheets don't match because
they used a different definition of week, or revenue.

------
Havoc
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
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
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).

------
asofasufb
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.

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bitL
With arrogance to irrelevance!

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throwaway613834
How do finance folks deal with decimals? Doesn't Excel use binary floats? Do
they switch to integers?

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
What? Excel handles decimals just fine.

~~~
dmurray
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.

~~~
TillE
It's all fun and games until you realize that adding a large set of numbers in
different orders gives you significantly different results.

Floats are fine for a lot of things, but you have to be really really careful
not to overstep into the situations they can't adequately handle.

~~~
cm2187
Even in accounting a certain rounding error is accepted depending on the size
of the company. And for pricing financial instruments, prices pretty much
always get rounded on the execution (you will never communicate a price with
20 decimals to a client on the phone). Excel rounding is a non problem in
finance. Except when you are making exact payments. But payment systems aren’t
run in excel anyway.

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

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

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qwerty456127
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
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.

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Havoc
Told hn exactly that a week ago and got downvoted

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15759644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15759644)

