Are you allowed to fully use at the tools at your disposal?
Kind of a quirky question. So obviously firms have a bevy of tools to help ease the analyst experience now. If you want a debt or equity quote or information on junk bonds, you can pick up the latest review from the cap markets team. If there's a really thorny slide deck or chart issue it'd take you hours to figure out, you can shoot it over to the Presentation team. If there's a report out there that FactSet/CapIq/Thomson doesn't give you access to but your bank could get otherwise, the data center in India is getting an email.
I've gone through the wringer of some banking experience and found that though all these tools are technically available to use, whether an analyst can actually use them without punishment is kind of up in the air (particularly the presentation center). I'm not talking about quick turnarounds/trivial changes obviously--you can't be on hold for a third party's work when that's the case. But a lot of times when deadlines aren't near and it'd take you just as long to alter a slide or mimic a chart as the slide center, I've found some associates/veeps are cool with you using them while some will flip out, impose a false "shadow" deadline ("I was hoping to get out of here at 6, not 6:30!", they'll grumble), and generally think that these newfangled tools dilute "what the analyst experience should be".
What have been your guys' (particularly those who have done analyst stints) experiences with these tools and how your immediate seniors perceive you using them?