Why do people in finance use this shitty program so much?

Why do people in finance use this shitty program so much?

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>OP cant afford it

I am over 18 and thus I realize this isn't acceptable

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Finance guy here. Excel is fine. Finance never has to deal with anything to more than four decimal places and I have never in all my years seen an actual business document use anything more complicated than multiplication and division. The vast majority of Excel documents that even do math are just addition and subtraction. Probably a majority of spreadsheets in the workplace though don't even do math. Excel just gives a tidy format for making lists of things and opens CSV files nicely.

Businesses choose Excel because it plays nice with the rest of the Microsoft Office and SharePoint suite, and new employees are likely to have experience with how to use it.

Finance isn't a laboratory. If your lab needs something more accurate or whizz-bang than Excel then by all means, use that, but this is like complaining that FedEx ships packages in trucks instead of Ferraris.

>He pays for software

>not a poorfag like most of (((biz)))

from my experience in corporate america, excel gets the job done.

There is little to no coding needed to be effective, your process can be easily documented, and the program is pretty universal among all businesses.

>trying to use a meme that you don't understand

>Why do people in finance use this shitty program so much?

Stop complaining like some shifty kike.
Instead learn Excel & VBA. Learn python (Python for Data Analysis from Wes McKinley is a perfect start) and be the fucking greatest hero in the office.

People will come from afar to bask in your data analysis skills. Trust me. Knowing this shit is more important than your five years of university business degree.

People use Excel because it does the job, is the most likely known spreadsheet software and is compatible with the sector's common file formats. You should know .xls, .csv, .xlsx, .pdf and .txt broadly account for up to 98% of the files found in such companies. Frankly, you must have never worked to ask this question. Financially speaking, Microsoft licenses cost nothing. We throw away more than $1,000,000 in data providers alone, and half as much in useless tools. I remember a $30,000 license for poorly converting .pdf to .xls. You don't need anything but VBA and Excel skills in the financial sector. Any additional language would never be solicited.

I work in finance I've never heard of this "ex cell"

Learn both. Normies can "use" Excel, so VBA is a natural fit.

There's very little point in programming if you're still stuck doing all the work after you've automated it.

>learned excel/VBA
>now all the boomers in the office come to me for IT related problems that I don't know how to fix because I'm not fucking IT

Fucking boomers

you have to play it subtle.

You can never allow to give the "computer nerd" vibe. Or every old guy fart comes to you to clean up his porn internet history.

Big threat.
But if you play it right, at the right kind of office youre just the excel-pro who is 20% more efficient than everyone else.

why do people use vlookup instead of index match?

Because vlookup is a meme. Everyone has heard of them and they all think it's fucking magic.

How do i know when i achieve expert excel status?

when you learn vlookup

Whats wrong with using pic related instead?

i still dont clearly understand how vlookup works, i just select random parts of data and keep on trying until it works. i use excel everyday...

Its support for VBA used to be really spotty so it didn't fit into workflows designed with Office.

Wew lad

Vlookup(look for this value, within this range, when you find it go this many over, false exact match or true something close to it)

excel is awesome wtf

>vlookup
Wew lad. Learn to index + match

this

So i'm a finance major and my school does an okay job at teaching us Excel, but I still feel iffy on it.

What reads / textbooks do you guys recommend that combine financial analysis and building financial models with excel? I'm hungry to learn but don't want to waste money on a textbook that sucks..

You will learn more about excel in an accounting/finance place in 3 days than you will in all of any business degree

I thought I knew everything about excel because uni taught us it in my finance major, I was in for a suprise

Yep

Is knowing excel a marketable skill?
How can I make money using excel?
Can I do freelance job knowing excel + vba?

Wtf i hate vlookup now

You can make calculations on large amounts of data, model it.

Who here /montecarlo/?

Saying 'proficient in excel' is not marketable. Being able to do Vlookup, Hlookup,Pivot tables etc., and on the more advanced side being familiar with macros and so on is definitely a marketable skill in accounting and finance - even from professionals higher up in the role they will almost always tell you that the most useful thing you can learn for your business career is excel.

>$1,000 MicroShillings has been deposited into your account

Jesus christ, this is just sad.

IT guy here lurking in Veeky Forums. I fucking hate it when people come to me with their issues with VBA errors. luckily our company outsources a lot of Office how-to shit so I have a phone number to give them. i'd love for our company to have people like that in their branches.

What do you mean there is no use? If you automate it then you can shitpost in the saved time, even if you can't leverage it into a promotion.

I agree with those saying its better than a 4 year degree. I got a 3 month internship with a geology degree out of college. Barely knew excel. Geology internship. Learn excel, and vlookup tables after much frustration of copypastin and sorting. Vlookup tables = fulltime lowpaying job. Then business changes, no need for geologist, i'm kept on for operating out databases. Next I move to Access, this brings up pay by 33% and not I am setting up the data infrastructure for the company's well operations. Could lead to big things.

Learn Excel and Access, Profit.

This. I'm the hiring head in my office's Workforce, Forecasting, and BI Analytics team.

Someone says they're proficient with Excel, my immediate question is "How do you perform a vLookup?" VLookup is really the lowest of the 'advanced' commands in Excel, and it's simple as hell (as others have put in, indexing is only marginally more challenging, and less error prone.) If you can't do that, then you really can't do Excel.

Now, you start talking SQL integration, VBA, hell, even Access integration, then you'll pique my interest. Anything shy of that, and I'm going to assume you're going to need help filtering.

In what cases do you use it?
How well does it work in excel?

Im more of a python guy, so im curious.

It's a bureaucracy thing, not really a finance thing.

In the navy people will type up documents and format them in excel. No I don't know why they don't just use Word. Also excel is never used for any kind of calculations or anything, instead its for fancy table formatting, again, not just using Word.

All training documents are in powerpoint. Even when they'd be better as just a simple word document. Then the powerpoints are printed out 4 slides to a page and carried around for when you're away from the computer, so you can squint at the bullet points.

I've never had my mind blown as hard as my first few weeks doing real navy work.

I'm sorry for you but this doesn't happen in finance. Excel is used for calculation—not advanced one, though—as well as Word for documents, and Powerpoint for “real” presentation.

>Finance guy
>4 decimals not 6
>doesn't even mention regression, scenario analysis, forecasting, bond pricing, time value, embedded formulas
>all his years

Interesting. I don't think being a cashier is really finance, but to each his own

Does anyone knows how to get a good webrip of Excel? As a poorfag student, I don´t want to feed the Microjew my money.

If you automate shit in a way that normies can't operate you are stuck with the responsibility of doing it and you just get more related shitwork handed to you.

You just become a robot whose job is to process mundane data.

If you create a program that no one can run after you leave is also a stupid thing.

If you are automating personal tasks, then it doesn't matter.

if you can't afford excel, i think you have other problems on your hand

buy Winzip as well

Students are usually eligible for free Microsoft Office, look into it.

Guys do I have to know math in able to be proficient in excel or I can survive with basic addition substraction division and multiplication making the program do all the math job for me using formulas?

VLOOKUP()
IFERROR()
SUM()
IF()

You'll be find knowing these. You can also combine them such as
=IFERROR(VLOOKUP(IF(x=y,x,y),A:B,2),"")

We use excel a huge amount in aerospace. They use it because
a) it's cheap and everyone has it
b) 99.5% of people don't know what SQL is

It creates it's own problems. Because excel is the only database in use, files of 80k + lines are generated, requiring writing VBA to sort and find. Now when you write it, you not only have to make it accessible for the people populating the data, you also have to lock it down so some idiot doesn't add another column or change a sheet name from "ThisSheet" to " ThisSheet" (note the space). It's a fucking nightmare.

>If you are automating personal tasks, then it doesn't matter.
What kind of retarded comment is this? It's lightening up your workload.

Corporate resistance to change. Its just been used for so long and there are so many retards that work in finance that have no interest in improving there own skills or understanding anything about data

I worked with my proff on a small fund, and everything was done with mysql, R, and C++. It made it a lot easier when everyone understood it.

I couldn't imaging having to create a financial model in excel after using R

>It's a fucking nightmare

I absolutely know how this feels. People sharing and working on huge datasets in excel across multiple files is awful. There's so much potential for error and trying to understand anyone elses work or decipher their model is next to impossible.

God damn, that last paragraph really hits home

It's happened a few times at my work that someone has made some sort of system or software that has become widely used by a lot of people, but no one else knows how it really works, and when they've left the company or been made redundant they soon get offered a lot more money than they were on to come back and help them use it again.

When you know all the excel shortcuts.

In investment banking it is a must, you have to progressively learn them all. Otherwise you're fucked

When you know them, let's just say you are at an bottom-low average level. Not advance. You are nearer beginner than advance level. Wtf

give me a job

Same reason they use Windows for an OS.

>work at a shit bank
>no reporting system
>the wagecucks dump million line data sets directly from the erp system
>do a pivot table

I agree. Vlookup is for faggots why not just press ctrl+f

I use excel , r, and minitab

Dude what?

You think you're smart but youre actually quite dumb

Doing an MBA just means you weren't smart enough for a STEM

>4 decimals not 6
Banks work to four digits. Disbelieve me if you must but I work with this stuff every day.

>doesn't even mention regression, scenario analysis, forecasting, bond pricing, time value, embedded formulas
If you are doing this shit in a spreadsheet on your personal computer you are too pleb to be worth the time of day. All this stuff is done on mainframes.

>inb4itroluhurrhurr

Kek you have no idea what you're talking about

first time i hear about vlookup... so, it's basically a gimped sumproduct() for text or am i missing something? i'd have figured people in finance mostly deal with numbers in their tables, not text.

still quite handy. i'm using complex sumproduct() formulas every day. so when i sometimes encounter text strings i've so far just cobbled together my own version using sumproduct() to locate the cell to find it's row/column which i then plug into index() to read the cell. never really bothered to look for an out of the box function. now i feel stupid...

Excel is a pretty good application but most people are too dumb to use it

>>doesn't even mention regression, scenario analysis, forecasting, bond pricing, time value, embedded formulas
who does this in excel?

Undergraduates

bc they are afraid of snakes

What? Can't people just look up those 4 functions on google in 20 minutes?

>learn VBA

Literally no point if you can use pandas and numpy, famalam.

You're spot-on other than that. Analyst here btw.

In answer to OP, excel is useful garbage, It's shitty, crashes a lot, and the syntax is a clusterfuck, but it's relatively easy for normies (read: old HR ladies) to use somewhat.

Having to do basic Excel shit for normies because they're too lazy to learn is terrible though.

Excel IS good for extremely detail-orientated work on small datasets, but anything serious and you'd want to use python

>iferror

U wot m8

Why would you ever need error handling for a vlookup.

Also
>no countif