Why do most people suck at Excel?

Microsoft Excel: the lifeblood of 21st century finance and business. A phenomenal spreadsheet tool used by the lowest level analysts through the most executive tier of management. A wonderful program capable of performing complex mathematics, charting graphs and calculating thousands of data points (sometimes) in the click of a button (when it's not crashing).

Most of us probably use excel every single day. Most of us probably develop models and various presentations the likes which will be utilized by various other parties and whose output will often be used in key decision making; which leads me to wonder **why so often spreadsheets are poorly formatted, messily organized, or follow zero convention for usability? **

I find too often that people do not take pride in their work, and do not produce workbooks that are easy to read, easy to edit, and easy to understand. Too often in my line of work (CF) I find that people (internal and external [eg. consultants/contractors]) do the bare minimum to produce the output they need and never think twice about the little things (color coding inputs/links/drivers/calculations, building in dynamic formulas, etc.). This might be different in banking where classes of analysts are (presumably) trained under the same general guidelines and where banks have set "formulas" for spread-sheeting.

However, what I can't determine is whether or not poor excel etiquette is a product of poor training/inexperience or sheer laziness. I find it terribly frustrating to be handed a spreadsheet that is a mess and that requires painstaking manual review to follow logic/presentation...

When I produce a spreadsheet, regardless of its end use, one of my top priorities is how easy is it to understand this presentation and how easy is it to update/edit, but maybe I'm just obsessive. So please, WSO, share your thoughts: How often do you encounter terrible spreadsheets? How important is the functionality of a spreadsheet to you? Do you follow color-coding, use dynamic formulas, build macros, consistent naming convention, etc in your spreadsheets?

Share an excel horror story below:

 
Controversial

You're dumb as hell and live in a sad bubble - or should I say cell - if you think Excel is the lifeblood of modern business. It's great software, and everyone in banking and finance uses it daily, but there are many more roles than financial analyst out there. And to be honest, it's a niche tool. I only use Excel when I work with traders or salespeople, because neither camp can write R or Python, both being infinitely more powerful than Excel. I'd rank the phone, email, and even the calendar as more vital to business.

in it 2 win it
 

As someone who went from using Excel on a daily basis in consulting to using no Excel whatsoever (went to work at Google), I can tell you that Excel is definitely not the lifeblood of 21st century business. Maybe late 20th century business but definitely not 21st.

Excel is exceptionally well suited for certain use cases which happen to be prevalent in finance: simple analysis (+,-,×,÷) using small amounts of data done by one or a few power-users and is intuitive enough to be understood by non-technical people.

But outside of this use case, there are tools that are better. On the data analysis front, Python and R are far more powerful. On the collaboration / intuition front, there's Sheets, Coda, and Airtable which are all better for managing information in large non-technical teams.

Excel will continue to be useful in finance and finance functions in large corporations, but it isn't the lifeblood of 21st century business by any means.

 

Henri addressed that.

Sometimes Excel and Access are better because who on earth wants to have to code in small changes to formulas or data when you can just edit a cell?

Plus Python and R are programming languages by design. They don't by default have a user friendly GUI you can use to perform any simple analysis on.

 

I somewhat agree. Excel becomes the default for many companies because the organization doesn't or can't get the commercial ERP system to do everything it needs to do in a cost efficient manner. So we are left with extracting data from said system and manipulating it for our intents and purposes.

In my opinion, Microsoft would have been run over years ago by competitors had it not been for Excel ingrained in so many businesses.

 

In levered project finance you have to have a base-case CF projection as a major foundation of the investment thesis. We invest LP JV equity in RE development, and I would say my pro forma influences at least 50% of my managing principals decision making process. We then use the same model on the asset management side by inputting actual performance over projections until the asset is sold.

Obviously financial modeling is an educated guess, but funds that are 80% accurate versus 70% accurate create a meaningfully higher RoE over the long-run...

 
Kassad:
You're dumb as hell and live in a sad bubble - or should I say cell - if you think Excel is the lifeblood of modern business. It's great software, and everyone in banking and finance uses it daily, but there are many more roles than financial analyst out there. And to be honest, it's a niche tool. I only use Excel when I work with traders or salespeople, because neither camp can write R or Python, both being infinitely more powerful than Excel. I'd rank the phone, email, and even the calendar as more vital to business.

Lol, good one

 

This... If you think Excel is a meaningful software outside this warped distorted bubble you live in, you need a serious reality check.

Do you think David Rubenstein prefers vlookup or index match? Please don't actually answer that question.

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
 
Elite_Bulge:
This... If you think Excel is a meaningful software outside this warped distorted bubble you live in, you need a serious reality check.

Do you think David Rubenstein prefers vlookup or index match? Please don't actually answer that question.

David Rubenstein doesn't actually work on solving problems. He asks the client what problems do they have, then tells someone else to provide a solution, which he'll review and present to the client. Do you think you'll have that luxury all on your own in a startup with a tiny team of 1-3 people? Rubenstein is like a figure head in this scenario.

 

Could you please elaborate on what kind of stuff you might most commonly use R or Python for? Thinking maybe it makes sense to learn? I use Sheets all the time...

heister: Look at all these wannabe richies hating on an expensive salad. https://arthuxtable.com/
 

Sadly excel is still a majority used tool at most institutions, so it isn’t a stretch to call it the lifeblood of an organization. Why people are using quant and excel in the same sentence is laughable though. Any one thinking they are getting a good picture based on excel models are just boosting their own confirmation bias. Leveraging excel for data stacking to be further used by data mining and analytics programs would be more viable.

 

I see you're in S&T, so I can definitely see how Python/R are useful. Frankly though, as someone who works in Analytics, I haven't seen much use for Python/R in any fields outside of quantitative finance and a select group of tech companies that are actually doing cutting edge work. Even in those scenarios though, I feel like there's a pretty small number of people that need to be that technical and the bar for getting in is so exceptionally high that it's not usually worth it to learn those technologies, I'm finding unless you're truly talented enough to be a STEM PhD at a school like Stanford and Berkeley, because those are the guys getting those jobs anyway.

Even in Analytics, I've been involved in a ton of pitching to clients during my time in consulting. Candidly, most clients don't have a need for anything beyond SQL skills for querying databases and retrieving info; alteryx to cleanse and aggregate data with a GUI that even non-technical people can understand (versus me writing a Python script to do it and the customer having to understand how to code); and then AMYBE a PowerBI dashboard to visualize the information. Half the time, they don't even care about a dashboard and just want a bunch of shit in Excel.

Again, I understand there are some tech companies that are doing cutting edge stuff where R/Python are useful, but I think most of corporate america, noting this includes old school companies in healthcare, manufacturing, etc. mostly just have a need for aggregating data quickly so they can run ad-hoc analyses in Excel. It's possible down the road, once data capabilities become more mature, that we'll have to gravitate again towards R/Python, but:

1. I doubt that happens for a long time still

2. There'll be low or no-code platforms, like Alteryx now, to do some of that for non-technical people once the demand is there

If someone wanted to learn tech skills for analytics, I'd bet that it's not just me that would tell most people to just learn SQL (which you can easily do on your own) and then either PowerBI or Tableau so you have the visualization skill-set down. Pretty much everything else will come more down to having business acumen than being a god at R/Python from what I've seen so far. Curious to know what use cases you've been seeing, however.

 

My horror story:

New company, asked to create a model using an old (but recently used model) as a template.

Links... they were everywhere. I break the links, only some break. I download a link breaker... it doesn't work. I go into Name Manager. hundreds and hundreds of links. I browse the extensions, they are tied to folders dated 2016. I realize, my team has been using models with links for years.

I delete all the links, overhaul the model, nobody seemed to care, nobody seemed to mind the links. I wonder, are they AI? do they have feelings, thoughts, cares, hopes, desires? Or are they just... another... machine...

 

Modeling leveraged projected cash flow scenarios requires knowledge in finance. It is quite unlikely but if you bring me someone who's been doing leveraged projected cash flows with pen and paper, he can learn how to do it in excel in a day.

 

I'd say Excel is a skill i have that differentiates me from my peers. Yet, when I look at it, even though i get rave reviews about my excel proficiency; i don't think it's a critical skill that would disrupt a team if they were to live without it.

A poorly coded and linked financial model would do just the same as a combed & polished financial model

 

Excel skill is great, but all it shows is that you're a power analyst. The benefit of an average Excel user vs. an advanced one is marginal at the end of the day. You're better off trying to hone the leadership, critical thinking, and communication/presentation skills that will get you promoted. You're not going to become a manager or director because you always color-code inputs, never hardcode anything, and can use Excel without a mouse. Especially since anything you put together in Excel ends up getting sent out in a PowerPoint anyways,

 

This is only partly true. While excel skills don't qualify someone to move up in an organization, they open the door for differentiating opportunities.

When someone is running a high-profile or complicated deal (or project), they'll select the strongest analyst. Someone accurate, efficient, with work they trust and that's easy to audit. To your point, if that person lacks professionalism/social skills, they'll pick someone to oversee that person and basically own their work when talking to management or clients, relegating them to a excel monkey, however if that person can handle themselves publicly, they'll have an opportunity to make a lasting, strong impression on everyone involved.

 

It's clear to me that none of the above comments are from monkeys working in infrastructure finance / project finance. Excellent excel skills are a minimum requirement in any long term, highly granular, cash flow based investment business. Not all excel modelling is as easy as in M&A or equity research.

To answer the OP's question, I think in the past there was not a universal modelling standard so models varied a lot depending on who built them. These days, the FAST standard is generally accepted as being the gold and thus most widely used standard. There's a network effect that comes with this, and I think in the next 20 years everyone will be building high quality FAST models.

For those interested, F1F9 has a pretty good introduction to the FAST standard.

http://www.f1f9.com/31-days

 

First paragraph is pure truth. Having worked in M&A and then in infra PE, infra Excel work is exceedingly more complex. Half the people in finance don’t even know what flags are.

I remember thinking I had intermediate skills on Excel coming out of school. Pure military-grade non-sense.

 

Respectfully, unless you have worked in infrastructure finance your excel skills probably aren't as great as you think they are. It really takes some on the job learning to get to the requisite level for infra finance. However, if you really like modelling, then this is probably a great area for you to move into.

 
Ironuts

It's clear to me that none of the above comments are from monkeys working in infrastructure finance / project finance. Excellent excel skills are a minimum requirement in any long term, highly granular, cash flow based investment business. Not all excel modelling is as easy as in M&A or equity research.

To answer the OP's question, I think in the past there was not a universal modelling standard so models varied a lot depending on who built them. These days, the FAST standard is generally accepted as being the gold and thus most widely used standard. There's a network effect that comes with this, and I think in the next 20 years everyone will be building high quality FAST models.

For those interested, F1F9 has a pretty good introduction to the FAST standard.

http://www.f1f9.com/31-days

Lmao at FAST as a gold standard. An utter crock of form over function standards designed by people who have never actually worked on the principal side of a transactio which fall apart the moment you work on a deal or workflow that holds any notion of complexity.

 

Love this thread, thoughts are below:

  • To everyone who is saying excel "isn't even that useful" - you are an idiot and have poor technical skills/abilities, thank goodness you probably work in consulting and don't need them

  • To everyone who is saying excel "is okay but it's so much worse than using cool coding shit" - you over complicate everything, unless you are in a quant role no one really cares what you are doing if they can't actually understand it

  • To everyone saying "poor models probably do the same thing as a pretty model" - I have nothing to say, you have no hope in understanding

  • To answer the OP's question, which is a good one, I'd say that to be frank most people try to get to the "answer" as quickly as possible with as little work as possible. It's human nature. I saw a lot of putting a band aid on a model in IB instead of actually fully incorporating it in. That's how mistakes happen and whether it's worth it or not time-wise is situation by situation. I think there's also some people that go way overboard (i.e. adding features not needed) and that is probably just as bad. Every project/model should start with a clear focus and intended outcome and be built/put however much time in as necessary. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

Hey; true story I work with a team of 3 analysts. Even though the MD acknowledges i have the "better" excel proficiency, I don't get to work on the models as such. It's always one of the other analysts and his formula/structure in my honest opinion is an eyesore. I don't think he knows how to even use Sum Product or break links or get a sensitivity table right.

Anyways despite all the shortcomings, the same analyst gets to work on newr models/business plan so I naturally came to the conclusion in a grand scheme of things, it's just about getting the job done. A nice structure/color-coded/linked model is secondary as long as the returns of the project is attractive...!

 

On the first day at my first job, my boss told me three I'll never forget.

  1. You can never know too much Excel.
  2. You can never know too much accounting.
  3. Always make your boss look good.

I've turned out ok.

 

I have a friend who dropped out of the rat race to run an Excel consulting practice. You wouldn't believe the horror stories of VPs from polished companies who don't know basic functions and will pay hundreds of dollars an hour to learn it out of corporate budgets. He's making a killing just showing folks everything from the basics all the way to VBA Macro stuff that I don't understand.

He gets retained here and there and then travels the world in-between assignments. I'm just a little envious.

 

I've found this to be a failure of training, consistency and clear standards in most cases. While I primarily function in the world of power points at this juncture - that ends up being just as bad. Inconsistent fonts, alignment, heavy text usage (the worst) along with a million other issues that will crop up over time if people aren't on the same page.

It's also a lack of clarity as the purpose, intention and overall audience for the deliverable. If i'm working on something that only I will ever touch, never update, etc. I guarantee you'd cry if you ever saw it. Absolute disaster. If it's client facing - well that's a whole other story.

My last comment is that I've found what often happens is new analysts learn all these tricks, macros, formulas, etc. and spend so much time trying to figure out how to apply all of them to these real world issues - when things like a simple pivot table or simple formulas would suffice. That, to your point, is what drive me up a wall. If i have to fix an automated spreadsheet every time it opens.... it's not automatic and not useful.

 

I find these same issues between excel and powerpoint to be pervasive at my company and I'm a bit relieved its not just us!

I think you're absolutely right though, its often a lack of clarity of intent//audience that misguides people to over/under-do work. This is probably in general, beyond the scope of just Excel, but I think this is an excellent point.

 

Just a few of the craziest things I've seen:

A formula literally combining like 10 vlookups using the "+" operator, for cells in subsequent order

A list of like 100 declared names not being linked to a single cell in a file

A report/model requiring manually updating like 10+ pivot tables

Hardcoded values everywhere, I mean, like hardcoded drivers, not color coded, and important drivers where you just have to "guess" how it was come up

0 standardization across tabs/similar files

Drivers spread across multiple tabs

People just have never been trained properly. Then they operate on the fly just throwing a bunch of stuff into Excel sporadically. This is the type of stuff that drives me insane. This is one of the reasons these files feel useless to a lot of people and definitely confusing.

 

Yikes on the hardcodes everywhere and drivers spread across multiple tabs. This happens to me on a weekly basis, I'm handed a file to work on/complete/edit and its a confusing frustrating mess (this is what inspired this thread, actually).

I was just passed along a model yesterday where not a single driver had a header. I had to trace the dependency of each yellow cell to try and figure out how it fit into the calculation. On top of that, there were drivers built into the actual presentation of the model that were hardcoded, and not colored. The lack of formatting literally made this project take hours longer than it should have. Definitely useless and confusing at some point, glad to see its not just in the CF world.

 

I tried to duplicate a file / tab before because it looked horrendous. Excel pops up with "Chart xxxx already exists, would you like to rename?" So I go about renaming maybe 5 or 10 of them. Go back to original file... notice there are no charts. Apparently somehow thousands of charts were created and named but not shown... I left a weight on the "Enter" key, came back 45 minutes later after a meeting and the alert was still going... I force quit all my files at chart 3000ish....

 
ForrestGump:
However, what I can't determine is whether or not poor excel etiquette is a product of poor training/inexperience or sheer laziness.

I agree with you that it's frustrating when the model isn't working right, or when it doesn't look that pretty, but I think that it's more of an 80/20 than a laziness rule that makes them look bad. The vast majority of the functionality of a model is going to be complete relatively quickly, and after that, formatting takes up a chunk of precious time. When there are deadlines (and let's be real-most projects have more pressing deadlines than then need to have), I can't blame the analyst for throwing the model together quickly to work on another aspect of the project.

If the model is going to a client, then obviously it should be different, but a .22 can kill a rabbit just as well as a .308 can. Might as well do what's easiest if it won't make a massive difference.

Remember, always be kind-hearted.
 

Literally just got told today that it is better to use a 10key calculator that prints a little receipt because people can "Monkey Around" with excel.

We're talking +/- of numbers sub 8 figures here.

Dinosaurs.

 
gator10:
Literally just got told today that it is better to use a 10key calculator that prints a little receipt because people can "Monkey Around" with excel.

We're talking +/- of numbers sub 8 figures here.

Dinosaurs.

Didn't you ever see Terminator 2!? Computers can turn on you!

 

I can see in certain instances in IB and CF where you might as well walk yourself out if you can't do basic tasks in excel.

I've been on the investment management side of things...weirdly enough analytics through an ERP system and third party software suites end up being far more useful in both customization and error-reduction than Excel's power. I know people at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs whose reports, which are done in Excel, take days and some times weeks to produce for clients, while for us it would take an hour to generate 100-200 pages of in depth models, analysis, benchmarking against peers, etc etc.

Excel is still the backbone of most biz/fin/co/industry functions...there are better ways of doing things but the cost of abandoning excel entirely is not feasible

 

I think I can explain this pretty easily. Most people (including a great number of people on this forum) aren't particularly clever or hard-working. Investment banking isn't exactly splitting diamonds with your mind. It's remedial accounting. I have multiple math and econ degrees. I was once something of a math nerd. I was on the math team in high school and college (it goes without saying that I did this for the women). I placed on the Putnam Exam. To me, the quant skills of the vast majority of the people on this forum are infantile. To be fair, my own quant skills have atrophied since I don't get to use them any longer, at least not the way I once did.

You see, Excel skills are the province of juniors (mostly). I've see a few CFOs look through models, but they would be poor users of the software. That's not their job. It's also not the job of a partner at a PE fund, the CIO at a family office or endowment, or the head of investment banking anywhere. In fact, the preponderance of VPs and Directors are worse at Excel than their analyst and associate underlings.

Technical skills atrophy over time. I'll say that again to make it clear--technical skills atrophy over time. Even if your mind never lost any information, the programs themselves change. I read a stat the other day that the half-life of a technical skill today is 4.5 years and shrinking by the day. Twenty years ago, it was 25 years. If you wish to stay at the leading edge of technical ability, you need to essentially completely retrain yourself every decade into perpetuity. That's beyond the capacity for most people.

It's hard for young people to understand how inelastic your mind becomes over time, and I'm not exactly an old man, but I can feel my mind hardening. I doubt it will be as pliable as it is today 10 years from now, and I suspect it will grow less pliant each day thereafter. That means it's generally a bad strategy to attempt to remain at the leading edge of technical skills throughout your career. At some point, you're unlikely to succeed in that regard and more importantly, you'll probably want to start getting compensated for all the other things you've come to learn through your years of experience.

That's a very long way of explaining that it's completely expected that most people are bad at Excel. They only spend a few intense years of using it before graduating into a role that requires it less and less by the day. It's not that they stop seeing the outputs from someone else's work, but they're no longer doing that work themselves. That's the goal, by the way. You want to eventually stop working 10 hours a day or more on excel, don't you? You can't see yourself at 40 or 50 still tinkering with models, can you?

If you can, then I imagine that the limits of your imagination are too limited to allow for leadership. The nature of leadership is that it requires you to let go of the minutia to trust others will handle it. That trust is the core difference between management and leadership, and why so few people are leaders. The problem in finance is that everyone imagines themselves to be running something someday. But most people in finance aren't especially adept mathematicians, aren't especially gifted strategists, aren't especially talented accountants and aren't particularly brilliant raconteurs. Deal-making requires excellence in none of those areas--merely competence. As a result, attempting to become well-lopsided in technical skills with a natural half-life in a world that (at the top) tends to reward some measure of well-roundedness in a leadership capacity seems like an ill-advised gambit to me.

At the same time, I bet most people don't think through problems to the same extent I do. I think most people (myself included) are fundamentally lazy and expending mental energy to work through a 'difficult' problem is a chore to them. 'Difficult' doesn't necessarily mean 'hard to understand'. Perhaps what I meant by 'difficult' was 'tedious'. Excel modeling is tedious as fuck. Mostly, I try to move through the tedious portions of my life as quickly as possible which can result in sloppier work than one might ideally like.

Thank all the Gods that might (but probably don't) exist that I don't have to spend much time in Excel anymore. My life is better for it.

 

I think the heart of my common complaint relates to junior employees not doing careful work - outlining their assumptions clearly, showing sources, and linking concepts succinctly. These are not really "Excel skills" but would apply equally to writing a research paper or composing an email. If a person is not careful in Excel (a simple program as you outline) I can imagine they would be doing dangerously careless analysis in R, Stata, SQL, whatever. People forget GIGO.

A lot of so-called advanced regression analysis or other quantitative programming in academia as well as business is at the surface pure data mining with no thesis behind it and cherry-picked results, just the sort of aimless, self-promoting junk meant to sell a service to less technically minded executives or investors with more money than sense.

Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.
 

"A lot of so-called advanced regression analysis or other quantitative programming in academia as well as business is at the surface pure data mining with no thesis behind it and cherry-picked results, just the sort of aimless, self-promoting junk meant to sell a service to less technically minded executives or investors with more money than sense."

It would be difficult for me to agree more with this statement. I have met dozens (perhaps hundreds) of people who think that doing something technical makes them clever. As if their knowledge of some statistical package is sufficient for uncovering the secrets of the universe. Unfortunately, many executives are technically inept and buy their services. To a person with high school level mathematics knowledge and grade school-level computer skills (of which, there are many in senior executive ranks), data analysis is indistinguishable from magic.

As you say, though, if there is no thesis behind the analysis, the data can lead you away from sensible results. You can be left with results in search of an explanation. But if your observations taint your ability to craft an ex-post hypothesis and then retest that hypothesis to confirm your results, you'll have massive confirmation bias in your conclusions.

 

People generally do an OK job of keeping PPTs and Word docs clean and organized because they're using that software every day.

Most people aren't using Excel as often so they're not used to keeping their workbooks organized and logical.

Thankfully I started out in economic consulting, where I used Excel heavily, every day, for years. On top of that, the culture for keeping workbooks clean and organized, logical, and easy to follow for anyone who opens it was very strong. Now that I work in management consulting I've been able to carve out a niche as the "data guy" even though my Excel skills are frankly average compared to the typical analyst at an economic consulting firm (I was never a star analyst or anything).

 

I sympathize. I think there are a lot of dead end jobs out there with limited growth potential. I had the same experience in private equity dealing with portfolio companies and later learned that the operations folks / Corporate finance folks I was dealing with had been in the same exact jobs and titles for years (some for over a decade). There was little upside to these roles - their wages just rose based on inflation. … so perhaps rationally they stopped caring about improving or doing a good job over a longer stretch of time... and became lazy and complacent. Poor incentives. Sadly this is reality for much of our economy.

 

Excluding silly errors that occur purely due to laziness and/or a genuine lack of attention to detail, what are a handful of Excel errors, or even Excel skill-gaps, that you encounter most often from members of your team? Attention to detail is something I've never had a problem within either academic or professional settings, and my grades in financial accounting and managerial accounting were As, but Excel is absolutely my weakest MS Office skill. One of my professional goals in 2019 is to become advanced in it because I'm pursuing IB.
Thank you for your time and feedback.

 

I think that becoming advanced in Excel beyond a purely academic application (such as being certified by MS) is going to be largely dependent on your day-to-day use. For most corp fin/IB applications I would recommend learning dynamic lookup formulas like the back of your hand, understanding logical formulas (and learning simple formulas to manipulate numeric/text data), some macro coding, and basic key-stroke commands. Above all though, I think the best way to stand out as competent and above average in excel is to have great attention to detail and to always consider the flow/digestibility of your models/inputs. Always consider your audience. I find, personally, the most frustrating excel issues that I run into are centered around the usability of a model. If it is not easy to understand the drivers/inputs, to manipulate drivers/inputs, or to walk through calculations without spending hours tracing formulas and reading through hardcoded formulas, then it is wasting someones time. Its great to understand a lot of the time saving functions in excel and to learn the advanced features but I would suggest above all to practice modeling and to always think "how easy would this be for someone to understand without me explaining anything". Color coding, clear labeling, clear layouts, etc > advanced knowledge of formulas/functions/add-ins/vba coding. The rest will come with experience and continue use. This is my $0.02.

 
EBITDAdjokes:
Excluding silly errors that occur purely due to laziness and/or a genuine lack of attention to detail, what are a handful of Excel errors, or even Excel skill-gaps, that you encounter most often from members of your team?

Real estate underwriting isn't rocket science, so the skill-gaps that bother me the most are aesthetic. Spreadsheets that I use should be easy to understand, easy to trace, and visually appealing or at least professional looking.

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 

Not sure if someone already talked about this but on Excel you've far more powerful tools than the usual you're mentioning. You're talking about dynamic formulas, agree. But what about Power Query, and Power Pivot, definitely the most powerful tool in Excel that no one use? And to mention something discussed before: you can implement R and Python in Excel... The problem is that most of people consider Excel a tool where you use formulas, instead of a starting point for a database (e.g. SQL and Excel)

 

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16 IB Interviews Notes

“... there’s no excuse to not take advantage of the resources out there available to you. Best value for your $ are the...”

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success
From 10 rejections to 1 dream investment banking internship

“... I believe it was the single biggest reason why I ended up with an offer...”