In my first lesson of the current course I am taking, BMD5302 - Financial Modelling for Fintech professionals, I was introduced to first to VBA, and then to a couple of popular functions in Excel.
I mean, I was mindblown a little bit by VBA. I’ve heard of it before, but I’ve never known what it does. Now I know: it is a way for you to control excel programmatically. The syntax seems easy enough, and very quickly I can see how it can be really powerful. It’ll allow you to automate almost everything that you need in excel.
So despite its, um, antiquated UI and 30+ years of age, the fact that it is the programming language for the most used financial and accounting software makes it very relevant still.
Because obviously halfway through the lesson I was asking myself: is there a point in learning this dinosaur technology in an age of big data, databases, SQL, Python, whatnot?
And the answer I arrived at was: yes.
The reasoning is simply as follows. 95% of the finance and accounting industry still uses excel. Sure, some quant shops would have something programmatic as part of their tech stack, but traders and business folks there will ultimately fall back onto Excel (or Google sheets). And if the world moves at the pace of Excel, then you need to move at the pace of the world.
And if excel is an unescapable fact of life, then you should make your future life easier by learning VBA.
Okay, case closed - I shall learn this course well.
The other funny thing is, I’ve never been a heavy user of Excel. Even for my finance course last term, I did everything on my Jupyter Notebook. I liked typing code and using python for my calculations. However, I discovered that referencing the notebooks was not a great UX experiece. Yes, they’re great for doing exploratory thinking, and for storing discoveries in a somewhat prose form, but as a reference for a series of numbers, it’s not that great. You really want something laid flat out on the screen, especially when there are tonnes of numbers involved and they’re all kind of interdependent. So, halfway through the course when I saw how you could use data tables to do sensitivity analysis, and easily store all the values in a visually deterministic way, I realized what makes Excel so powerful and unbeatable.
And the fact that Microsoft did partnerships with many universities to make the office 365 suite free for them also points to the savvy and enduring origins of this behemoth software. I have been thinking a lot about most used software products in people’s lives. It didn’t occur to me that the Office Suite is hands down the most pervasive, influential, and widely used products in perhaps all of human history. So whilst admiring the smoothness of the cell-to-cell transitions in this free Excel provided for me by NUS, I realized that the godfather of all financial softwares is staring at me in the face.