This isn't exactly XBRL as the calculations are all bespoke, done for the purposes of these specific presentations
My vision is separating financial analysis from formatting, or bringing CSS / markup languages into the world of Excel and sidestepping PowerPoint entirely if possible
PowerPoint is a slide presentation tool that is sadly used for authoring so-called "books" with lots of formatting in Investment Banking, Management Consulting and Corporate America at large... and its shortcomings become immediately obvious
As we speak (!!!), I'm having to reformat a book from our standard template into the client's template by manually resizing charts, recoloring series, etc... literally wasting hours of my time because we use Excel + PPT
Client templates happen, but they aren't the norm. I pointed that example out as one egregious waste of time, but simply conforming Excel charts / tables to the company's format is very time consuming on a day-to-day basis.
A lot of people just don't have an intuitive sense for design or plain don't care, so you're left with a high variance in the quality of the work that is produced. Speaking from my banking experience, the result is senior bankers have to spend time marking up documents on things like formatting, and junior bankers feel frustrated because they waste their productive hours on non-productive work. And it's generally a frustrating experience indeed as the tools we use aren't built for this purpose.
But formatting is just part of it. "Code" reusability (more like financial model reusability) is basically zero, auditing is a pain and people use many different approaches to do the same things, but again with varying levels of efficiency and accuracy. I can tell you 10 ways to calculate Total Shareholder Returns for a public company using the FactSet add-in in Excel. Also several ways to pull Revenue and EBITDA figures, and these aren't even the more esoteric metrics like Free Cash Flow or Funds from Operations.
These decks that we prepare should work like recipes. Input the ingredients and out comes the prepared dish, but everything is so god damn manual
Not to mention issues with Excel itself, like how Excel's (non-cascading) styles and defined names (similar to variables) propagate to other workbooks if you copy-paste content from one to another, which in the long-term creates files full of garbage that crash and corrupt frequently
The whole paradigm is a shit show. One day it will be different, I am certain. But nobody has taken a holistic, multi-disciplinary view at the problem because bankers / consultants don't know what is possible with today's technology and the ones trying to address these usability issues are only looking at a couple pieces of the puzzle at once
I was curious about this problem so I went digging around.
As I understand it, financial companies often want to gather data from multiple places but consolidated in a digestible form to make financial decisions. (what kind of financial decisions, I'm unclear on, since most trading is done by computers now, but maybe this is for ETFs or OTC trades) And they're use to looking at it on PDFs and Powerpoint, because that's what people email around, and no one trusts having financial slides on the web. (why, btw? In case they leak?) And because you have many clients that want the same or similar sort of analysis on publicly traded companies, you'd ideally be able to change the analysis once, and then generate all the PDF and PPT reports they want to see.
It does seem like a giant waste of time to cut and paste data from excel into powerpoint by hand. However, you should be able to export Excel data to Power Point via the Visual Basic Editor. (https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/vba-powerpoint/) Do people not use VB to prepare this?
I don't get the impression that analysts in finanace would be willing to move from Excel to a notebook. Do you get a different sense? What would a notebook have to offer to get them to switch? Analysts generally seem to love Excel, with the exception of the slow first load and crash.
> As I understand it, financial companies often want to gather data from multiple places but consolidated in a digestible form to make financial decisions.
Yes, this is spot on.
> (what kind of financial decisions, I'm unclear on, since most trading is done by computers now, but maybe this is for ETFs or OTC trades)
Sales & Trading is but one part of banking. Yes, a lot of S&T is automated, but long-term strategy isn't defined by computers and neither is pitching to win new businesses. Besides S&T, there's also Restructuring (advisory and financing) and Mergers & Acquisitions. My opinion is written from the perspective of an M&A banker. I probably make ~3-4 PPT books every week on average.
> And they're use to looking at it on PDFs and Powerpoint, because that's what people email around, and no one trusts having financial slides on the web. (why, btw? In case they leak?)
Concerns over leaks is certainly a driver, but traceability and auditing also play a role. 3 years from now, I can certainly retrieve info that was attached to an e-mail but a link may have long expired. Also most recipients are over the age of 40 so might not like using links in general
> It does seem like a giant waste of time to cut and paste data from excel into powerpoint by hand. However, you should be able to export Excel data to Power Point via the Visual Basic Editor. (https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/vba-powerpoint/) Do people not use VB to prepare this?
Certain tools like the add-ins provided by FactSet, S&P's Capital IQ and, less commonly, Bloomberg, export data into PPT with some metadata attached to it that allows you to refresh content quickly (in theory). It's all built as plugins on top of MS Office apps so your experience is not always smooth. Plus they don't solve the bigger issue of reusability
> I don't get the impression that analysts in finanace would be willing to move from Excel to a notebook. Do you get a different sense? What would a notebook have to offer to get them to switch? Analysts generally seem to love Excel, with the exception of the slow first load and crash.
I think Analysts like spreadsheets with very responsive UIs and countless hotkeys. Muscle memory is a major thing in this business.
My vision of a solution would be one that still implements spreadsheet-like functionality but does so in pieces that connect together all the way through publishing via an integrated paradigm
And to be clear, such paradigm could sit on top of Excel. It's the tooling around it and the workflow that I think will be solved. Where the boundaries of what a new app / system lie exactly is open to debate, however
As someone with some amount of influence over the direction of Excel, I'd love to sit down with you to better understand this scenario better. Would you mind if I contacted you off-HN? My contact info is in my profile. Thx!
