One huge reason why Finance pros in general, and Fund Managers, Brokers, Traders in particular, love Microsoft Excel is because all your ...

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.

Posted by justboxing on Nov 30, 2017, 9:31 PM

Tags

• pricing (SaaS)

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