Is Excel Inferior ?

I guess that it really depends on the context.

Excel may be inferior when being used for certain purposes. These include data storage (i.e. having max 1m+ rows of data in excel VS almost unlimited storage in cloud servers) and analysis (e.g. no AI-functionalities in excel, etc.).

However, for other purposes such as financial modelling or simple calculations, I would still rather use excel due to the ease of usage (especially when performing very customized calculations) and the wide-spread adoption & understanding of the tool.

You use different software for different purposes, so it's not really a question of whether one is better or inferior. Excel is easy to use and great for quick analysis or visualizations. For most people in banking/consulting Excel provides all they need and is the standard, so there's not much point in moving to another software/platform.

For more analytical tasks you would want to know at least SQL and something like R or Python. Excel is pretty much unusable once you have more than 1M rows, and for fields like data science you rarely have datasets smaller than that so you can't use Excel even if you wanted to. Also a lot of (most?) programmers think that VBA is painful to work with, so that might be why some people don't like Excel.

I personally use Excel for things that can be done easily in excel, and other tools/languages for things that are better suited for them. They are just different and one is not really "inferior". If something has to be shared with clients or have to be presented to non-technical audience Excel might be better suited since most people in business understand at least the basics of how Excel works.

Not a banker but I've been programming for nine years.

They might be referring to VBA in which case I agree, it's god-awful. If you know how to program, VB is pretty awful. It's clunky, old, and most people advise not even learning it to begin with. But excel itself? that's a quality tool for smaller data sets, there's no point to outsource to the cloud when you're just using it for simple tasks.

so basically, vba sucks but its what you gotta deal with, excel is pretty good.

Ugh, fuck this makes me glad I'm not in college anymore. You should get out more and try to solve whether Becky's ass is inferior to Lucy's. Or just anything that actually matters or is some kind of interesting. Fucking excel.

Quants use programming because programming languages' strength is in its ability to set parameters and customized logic flows.

Bankers use spreadsheets because they use these to pitch for deals and sometimes share this file to the corporate finance counterparts who grew up with accounting's balance sheet, income statement and cashflow statement.

They're for very different purposes and Excel can only do so much in carrying beginner tools of our complex features.

If you are doing any type of data-heavy modelling then SQL is better than Excel. Because Excel could hold only 1m rows of entry (if my memory serves me well) and its sorting is way slower.

No method is definitively "better" than anything else. For reference I've worked with Excel, VBA, SAS, Stata and I also know some Python. What language/tool I use depends on what I'm trying to do. If the data set is small (thousands of rows) then I generally prefer to use excel because its quick and you can visually see what you're doing. It's also a lot easier to have others provide input on your work if you did it in Excel. If it's a repetitive calculation that can still fit in excel then I'll try using some VBA. If it has anything to do with regressions I go with Stata - and generally if I'm dealing with a huge data set (millions - billions of observations) I would default to using SAS.

Each method has their advantages and disadvantages.

I some have experience with both excel and programming languages - here is my 2 cents: I think the more advanced languages that computer science people are referring to refers to any Object Oriented Language (java/python/c) etc and while it is better in some regards it depends what you are doing.

In regards to doing quantitative analysis - programming languages will typically always offer better analytical tools. You can do things to a much bigger scale and much quicker than in excel (referring to repeating a calculation) - but with that said - to build something in 3 seconds in excel to test out is much quicker than doing it via writing code - so you may see guys model out a small data sets in excel to create a gameplan as to how they are going to code it out or what they anticipate some results on looking like and then coding it out. The biggest issue for a quant in using excel is the scalability and control. If I want to change a formula to apply to a data series I can do it one place and quickly see it vs in excel you may have to change your cell references/add columns/ have a more difficultly defined formula etc. I don't need to see all the little data - most of the time I am looking at some statistical output/ a graph and trying to interpret it.

In regards to something like financial accounting modeling, where every datapoint is important - excel will almost always be easier use - primarily due to unique nature of each company. In reality - we can construct something to do the modeling in programming (due to the standardization of accounting and convergence in international and US based accounting) - that would have the same output as you would as a good modeler in excel - but that will never be scalable over time because of the one offs. If management notes change and you have to change assumptions for one quarter - locating and making a change like that (especially with a much tougher visualization) is much more difficult. If we had every company use a specific set of rules in their accounting and there were no customized notes written in different phrasing then using programming would be much more feasible. However, most of the time I would trust an analyst to be able to make that decision over some rules based AI.

Its definitely worth it to know both as they complement each other - and can make your job much easier. Additionally - I have the opinion that this move towards quantitative analysis/degree is just a fad. It will grab all the low hanging fruit - which is what a majority of the Asset Management was/is. Most guys do not generate alpha - and in those cases a machine would be (and has been) a cheaper quicker replacement.

As a guy with two technical master’s (Mathematics and MFE), I can tell you that I went to school with these guys. Most likely, the reason they think Excel is inferior is because they don’t know how to use it. In any decent MFE program they will have learn how to use it a lot better, and they will whine until they realize how flexible Excel/VBA is, and that it can “think” in ranges just as R and Python. Once they know how helpful it is in this industry, they will want to take some serious Excel tutorials. I know, because that’s how I made some extra cash back in grad school.

Two of my accounting professors have told me that Tableau has begun to replace Excel at accounting and consulting firms, although I've used it and I don't think it could handle a financial model.

I'm a big fan of Alteryx, it's a GUI based software that is very user friendly and does all the coding in the background (great for people with little to no coding background). I think that programs like this greatly outperform excel for more advanced analytics or ETL work. But excel is great at being excel, if that makes sense.

Excel, inferior?

Why would I write with a cheap Pilot pen when I could instead use this lovely, state-of-the-art fountain pen? All I have to do is go mine some ore, smelt it into metal, forge the metal into a pen, burn some wood to make carbon for ink, pick up a degree in materials science so I can figure out how the hell plastic is made so I can craft a shaft...

I don't understand, your comp sci friends could easily generate and run a coin flip/dice roll scenario in excel to figure out which hand and or real doll to make it with tonight.

Ohhh wait, they want it to be able to run in perpetuity for a lifetime scenario? Yea they're probably better off with something that can handle that large of a data-set.

I have yet to work with a spreadsheet program that beats it. It is very straightforward and user friendly. The majority of people out there will have zero reason to go beyond excel's capabilities and those that do already know a system they prefer.

Okay guys a little update...personally I definitely like Excel, it's just that people around me seem to be really obsessed about CS (not Credit Suisse), and I feel like they kind of feel superior doing CS work so that's why I asked this question on WSO.

I like Excel and I use it a lot...My friends who said that are: a TA from the Math department, a guy who's going to Columbia and a guy who's going to Google to be a software engineer...I know they are not the brightest people, but not morons right...

I do not have sufficient permission to edit the topic? Why? Because monkey sh*t > Bananas?

I'm a former banker / PE associate who is now a software developer so I've used both Excel and "legit" programming languages extensively. Excel is great for its intended purpose: ad-hoc modeling and calculations with small, messy, heterogenous datasets. In a banking or PE context, that is all you really need.

Programming languages are great for building software or doing advanced analysis with large, standardized, homogenous datasets. Outside of quant style hedge funds and a few projects at consulting firms, you probably won't come across a need for this in finance. On the industry side, you may need this on occasion, but most companies' data is such an inconsistent mess that putting it through some advanced Python model is a complete waste of time. Most companies would be better served focusing on being able to produce a clean set of financials and a reliable way to track 2 or maybe 3 simple KPIs (you'd be surprised at how many fairly large companies cannot do either of these things).

Excel is widely regarded as being inferior for purposes of rigorous computational analysis as it relates to statistics and academia in general.

That said, it's totally fine for the purposes it is used for by bankers. Your friends are being stereotypical engineering snobs.

Excel is actually pretty powerful for what it is, and having a baked in user interface is more useful than people give it credit for.

Excel is inferior and superior at the same time. It depends on what you're trying to do. Also, Excel has a much lower learning curve than coding. However, if you're comparing VBA to coding (for example C++ or python), VBA can't do as much as C++ or python from a strict coding perspective. However, if you factor in that you can use excel functions in conjunction with VBA, it's actually really good. Imagine that you had to code every function that you use in excel. That'd be a bitch. And with excel, it's much easier to visualize because you can look at the spreadsheet to debug. But, these can't really be compared because they serve different purposes. Your friends might just be assholes.