[Closi]

> Well investment bankers tend to be pretty good at excel

> This is how I can tell you have never seriously worked in excel.

Ah, so the style guide and best practice is based on “Trust me - I rock and you suck”.

I can guarantee that I do use excel seriously, and my personal experience is the exact opposite. You wouldn’t see beautiful code with variable names like A2, and it’s exactly the same for me with excel.

Besides - a feature you can turn off in about 5 minutes stopped you from doing a deal?! Why not just explode the named ranges out? I suspect the issue here is an overly complex model rather than named ranges - I’ve seen lots of these without named ranges too and they are even less manageable in that state!

[clausok]

This debate about whether to use named-ranges in Excel formulas brings back some distant memories. I was on a team at Goldman Sachs that built Excel tools for the investment bankers and because of that we'd help out with the new banker Excel training held at the giant Chelsea Piers sports complex.

Every year freshly minted MBA's would begin the training and immediately become aghast when the trainers told them to never, ever, use named-ranges in formulas. Not only had the trainees been explicitly taught to use named-ranged in their MBA programs, but any idiot could plainly see that [=enterprise_value/ebitda] was better in every way than [=C13/F22]. More expressive, more readable, easier to spot errors, etc.

The trainers would argue that in an MBA program you build your models, submit them, and move on to the next assignment, so you don't get a view of the longer-term problems that arise from named-ranges. What does [=ebitda] actually tell you? Is that the last quarter's actual number, is it the current estimate of the next fiscal quarter, is it a 12-month blended forward estimate?

And as you try to solve those questions with [=ebitda_est_next_fiscal_qtr] you often end up with two more problems: an unambiguous name for you can unambiguously mean something else to someone else and as you update your model over time, if you forget to update your named-range references, you have formulas that look right, but are wrong, e.g., [=ebitda_est_next_fiscal_qtr] now refers to an actual reported ebitda number, not next quarter's estimate.

[=C47] while not telling you much at all, is unambiguous. It doesn't look "right" or "wrong". It can't mislead you. If you want to know what it is, go look at cell C47. The new MBA's would argue, "Wait a second, C47 could now point to the wrong data as well, and it could be mislabeled with a stale row or column header. And the trainers would reply, "Exactly, and when you go to see what C47 represents you will have the context to recognize those errors and fix them."

[LordEthano]

You put it in much better words than I could, thanks haha.

Also, very cool experience at Goldman!

[codesnik]

heh, your exchange looked pretty much like a holywar between programmers. Except problems looked like if you're discussing merits of different old varieties of BASIC, with GOTO and line numbers. I really don't see how excel is more visual, or easier to grasp after adding just a several columns of data or formulas.

I wonder if there could be made some middleground language, visual enough to not being scary for spreadsheet people, and debuggable and readable enough to not become a mess when model becomes big. Jupyter comes to mind, but it looks like it didn't get any traction outside data science.