Hacker News Reader

I am curious about your comment on 100-1000x fewer formulas. Is there a simpler example you can show how your product will do it relative to Excel? When I read your comment, I was thinking, SUM in Excel operates over many cells. You can have Arrays, etc. in Excel. So I am not sure how formulas work in your product that is fundamentally different. Is this like a function that I can define and call that function so it is easier?

View on HN

Great question! Quite often in financial models, you're dealing with "dimensions" (e.g. your revenue is broken down by product, geography, and time). To model this in Excel you have to write complex SUMIF/INDEX/MATCH formulas. Then you have to drag these formulas over 1000s of cells (if you make a mistake you're screwed, see https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/).

Causal's building blocks are "variables" and "dimensions" which makes it much more powerful to work with dimensional data.

This video explains this in a more visual way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WELP2A5IzF4&ab_channel=Causa...

Thank you. That makes sense. I totally agree, Excel is a nightmare to debug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com