| One aspect that is rarely talked about is that Excel is really good for developers who know about data/stats/business/databases but don't know about frontend app development. Excel thrived in banks, not because traders used it, but because IT/Quant people used it. It's so much more straightforward to build a UI in Excel than with React. Just type things in cells, then wire them with simple VBA buttons. Of course there are things you can't do, but for the purposes of a bank, it's very rare that you find one. So if I am a quant, I don't need to go to the frontend guy, trying to explain to him what a "vega" is and why I would want to multiply by notional/vol to change the units. This is a huuuuge time saver. And you can change your UI anytime. Just open the file, add a column, click save and it's done. At some point, banks knew that fat-finger-mistakes could cost them fortunes, and the lack of auditing was terrible. But they had to force traders to switch off their sheets by threatening them with internal fines (we'll charge you $2m for running things with Excel). So traders complied, but then they got into years-long projects, to create shitty shitty web apps, that couldn't do half of what Excel had built-in. Every change would need to go through an approval process, and it's unclear whether these systems had less bugs than spreadsheet did. The first thing they wanted when the project was done? "Give me a button to export to Excel". For the shameless plug part, I am building a tool to try and bridge code and spreadsheet (https://www.jigdev.com). Lmk if you have comments/suggestions. |