[AccessD] I was not going to post this

Ha ha, sad but true... Excel is supposed to be the most used (and
potentially abused?) database in the world.

A few years back I built a spreadsheet, for a investor, out of Toronto by
the way, which had a series of inter-connected forms that allowed the user
to just enter from a single position and edit rows or ranges and add, delete
rows or ranges. The client really liked spreadsheets because unlike
databases, if you disliked the summary reports you could go in and easily
change a few rows so to achieve the appropriate results. To complete this
exercise, he gave me a group of calculations which I dutifully re-entered,
that he had extracted from someone else spreadsheets who in turn extracted
from some previously unknown person...how far back this all went no one
knew.

At the end it all worked as expected but after working on and off with the
fellow for about five years he went broke and retired to a cabin up on lake
Huron. I will never know whether it was because some formula did not predict
the market change correctly, whether some tweak to the figures caused some
cascading problem or was it something else quite unrelated. The truth is
that neither of us knew how this huge block of calculation code actually
worked. 

Jim   

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of William Benson
(VBACreations.Com)
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 2:11 AM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] I was not going to post this

PS -     you might as well get your facts right, the "L" group 
             for Excel is developers (ie, programmers), the "G" group is 
             general Excel questions.

PPS - Excel is a LOT more fun to mess around with the object model than
Access

PPPS - Most of the stuff you produce in Access or Oracle or SQL Server or
wherever will ultimately be analyzed in Excel.

-----Original Message-----
From: William Benson (VBACreations.Com) [mailto:vbacreations at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:04 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: RE: [AccessD] I was not going to post this

Art, you take one thread (or a couple) and then kick an entire Listserv to
the curb? You ought to be ashamed   ;-)

Plus you just insulted both me and Darryl... 

Meanie.


-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 4:11 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: [AccessD] I was not going to post this

For some reason I ended up joining a list about Excel
EXCEL-L at peach.ease.lsoft.com),  mistaking it for one our our lists. Wow was
I wrong/ These people need more than a lifetime of help. Unfortunately, as I
age, I don't have that much time.. .

To be fair, it's a user's group not a developer's group, and it does shed
some light on the differenence.

The scary part is that some of these people fancy themselves as "Quants",
short for Quantitative Analysts, which means that they are risking the
hard-earned money that others have made and invested in this or that fund.
And I am aware of many of their algorithms, having once worked for a
Bermudian hedge fund, which at least had the sense to use SQL Server rather
then Excel.

This seriously frightens me. These Excel listers, save on or two, don't even
know that there is a difference between a Range and an Array.

The prospect that these people are playing with millions of dollars of money
belonging to other people is truly frightening. The up-side is that I have
invested zero dollars in the opinions of these fools; the down-side is that
many several millions have, and I fear for their prospects.

I guess what I am saying is this: if you want to realize what a valuable
group this one is, just go visit that one for a minute or two. To think that
these people are waging millions of other people's dollars on their
"feelings" is ghastly.

Hold onto your wallet; trust no one, especially if they come bearing a
spreadsheet.Yes, there are tools available to audit spreadsheets, and I
trust them. But in their absence. do not trust anyone. These people are
jokers, fools or scammers. Take your pick.

I do not fancy myself as an Excel guru. But once I learned the model, I had
no problem doing some fancy footwork in Excel. Bur rhis goes to way that
there is a difference between a programmer and a user. The frightening part
is that users equipped with Excel are making decisions involving millions of
other people's dollars.

--
Arthur
Cell: 647.710.1314

Prediction is difficult, especially of the future.
  -- Niels Bohr
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