Very common in investment banking. You're trained to use excel without a mouse or by navigating the menus. All the shortcuts are memorized.
The reliance on excel in all aspects of investment banking is remarkable. From the simple stuff in corporate finance (merger analysis, capital issuance etc.) to complex derivatives pricing on the market side.
On the pricing side, external libraries typically handle the heavy lifting, but excel is the glue that brings it together. Certainly not the most efficient tool - I've had spreadsheets that take over an hour to calculate. You'd hit F9 and head out to lunch.
Which movement do you think is strongest? The AI camp or the ones that think programming should absolutely be a part of a proper education in business or economics? I hope for the latter, because I think it will be the end of the huge gap there is today, between the decision makers and the engineers, two groups who quite often but for no good reason feel alienated from each other.
If you make programs that 'speak business', then you make programs that are significantly more complex than those that 'speak computer'. Learning how to handle this complexity and optimize this kind of code is not something a business/economics person wants to spend their time doing. So they leave it to someone who specializes in it.
I find that you can score someone on a whole range of skills, much as you can on computer games. The more overall skills you have, the more you will cost. If a job requires excellent programming skills but doesn't need any business skills, then paying for someone that has excellent business sills would probably be a waste of money.
In terms of your parent point about whether all business analysts should learn some programming, I think that programming skills are definitely helpful for business analysts, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. Different skills help in different situations.
Given that Excel isn't really targeted at these kinds of user (heavy lifting typically offloaded to external libraries) it wouldn't be "Sad" if they didn't already do it, and I would in fact be pleasantly surprised. Which is why I'm asking the question.
EDIT: Turns out you're right! https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb687899.asp...
To trigger these you usually have to be aware of them and write your code in a certain way.
It's a pretty easily parallelizable problem since the sheet is just a dependency tree with the cells as nodes.
The build-in functions (e.g. probability distributions etc.) could also be multi-threaded, although I'm not sure if they are. Our external API called from cells was written in C++ and already multi-threaded.
More info here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb687899.asp...
And you cannot switch Excel to English, but leave Outlook in German. Language setting is global over all Office programms.
And even if you could, at work the IT department has greyed out that setting via some policy. Even though I am Administrator on my work desktop, I cannot change the language!
sleazy, but still better than Apple.
You suggest they give their hardware for free? Or that they are forced to have their OS run in competitors hardware?
Non native english speaker, but I use English menus for all programs, and English menu language for the OS.
As long as I can write and spellcheck in my native language, I am fine.
Unless I didn't speak english at all, why would I chose to see my language's word for Edit instead of "Edit", and never be able to take advantage of 2.000.000.000 tutorials, instruction videos, forum posts, that almost all assume english menu items?
So do I - on workstations I control. Alas the mandatory corporate Windows laptop isn't one of them, so I have to constantly switch between English on my own devices and French on that laptop... Definitely hampers shortcut memorization.
Also, a curse on Microsoft for localizing Excel formulas - what were they thinking ?
You seem to be french - so I am confident you can picture someone (dad, mom, an old uncle perhaps?) that would have an easier time remembering that a function is called RECHERCHEV than if it were called VLOOKUP or ASDFNASF!#^E3 or what have you.
Yes, but then make that language a user-switchable parameter... It is not like Microsoft is shy of adding parameters to the settings dialog...
+1. It's like programming in Java or C and all the keyworks (if, interface, etc...) were changed to the local language.
Madness.
Umlaute in keywords, yay!
Example stolen from Wikipedia:
Prüfe Fall wd
Fall 1
' Auf Sonntag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben
VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 2
Fall 2
' Auf Montag wird Datum vom letzten Freitag zurückgegeben
VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 3
Fall Sonst
' Andere Tage: vorheriges Datum wird zurückgegeben
VorherigerGeschaeftstag = dt - 1
Ende PrüfeAnd it's true even for those who during some time in their life spent some years in some English speaking country.
Googling will give you a much broader pool of solutions, and having to translate the names of options and commands you need help with just to gain access to this pool is an unnecessary extra step
http://www.centage.com/billion-dollar-errors-from-spreadshee...
- programmers never make copy and paste errors in other languages
- programmers never reverse a plus and minus sign in other languages
- programmers never break things with a last minute change
- there are never errors due to the size of code bases
Oh, right. Nearly all of those errors happen no matter what language you are using. Because they are humans giving instructions to a computer, who just does what the human says.
(Ok, the version control complaint might be better handled by merging in git or other DVCS. And there are troubles when people give you a csv where a field is the text 1e24 and excel turns it into a number because you told it to be magic when importing, rather than specifying that column was text)
Edited to add: the focus of that article is on accounting. Double entry accounting was created to make you input everything twice to help ensure you are doing the correct thing. You mess up one of the two items and stuff doesn't balance. Modern accounting software automatically creates the second entry, so you have no idea whether you did something wrong. That's the real issue. We came up with an accounting system that is slower to help make sure you did everything correctly, then we automated it so you only have to input one entry so accounting is faster and all of a sudden, we are surprised that more mistakes are made!
> Because: > - programmers never make copy and paste errors in other languages
But they are discover-able and you can audit them and then fix them
> - programmers never reverse a plus and minus sign in other languages
But they are discover-able and you can audit them and then fix them
> - programmers never break things with a last minute change
Version control!
> - there are never errors due to the size of code bases
Yes this one is just STUPID
-
Did you watch the Spolsky video? I only ask because this is all child comments from a top level comment about a Martin Shkreli video, and since I watched that first, you might have as well and not gotten to the original video. The way Joel suggests using Excel is very like how developers program when using good practices. Always name ranges and cells before using them. Never use numbers directly in formulas (unless obvious, like 365), use the named cell/range you set up. Use tables when you want tabular data so you are prevented from accidentally using the wrong formula for portions of ranges. Use the included named formatting themes for cells that are meant to be user editable, and those that are computed.
I watched the video and very quickly came to the conclusion that Excel is an IDE+Interpreter, like what people refer to when talking about Smalltalk (I assume, I've never actually used Smalltalk). The other thought I had is that it's probably the closest we've ever gotten to what people mean when they describe a visual programming language that just about anyone can use. Predictably, we often see the counterarguments to a system like that exhibited in Excel spreadsheets, which is poorly architected and designed spaghetti-code from people that don't have enough experience to know any better because they are amateurs.
Copy and paste errors look far more discoverable when you use R1C1 mode, and look to be outright prevented in a lot of cases when using tables.
Version control might be a good argument if it actually applied. Excel is a language, and I don't see any special version control baked into other languages programmers often use. It sits on top of them, and I don't see any reason why it couldn't sit on top of Excel as well. Export to a format that is version control friendly (perhaps with the help of an extra tool) and commit to VCS. Want to make a change? Check out the spreadsheet, convert as needed, and start working. Problem solved.
Really, I came away with a much clearer picture of what Excel specifically is after the Spolsky talk, and it probably wasn't even that advanced. What it did do was give a crash course for programmers that let you make the clear associations to what you do in other languages, so there was communication going on at a few levels.
1: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/131605/best-way-to-do-ver...
A lot of what he was doing wasn't even that fancy, just lots of holding ctrl to navigate cell ranges quickly and pasting of formulas and such. I'm surprised he didn't format his data more nicely though, but if this is just for his own personal use I get it. Color formatting for inputs vs calculated metrics are really helpful though.