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Comment by xerophtye | Hacker News Reader

Valid Point: High-Ranked execs use it and usually try to translate everything into excel sheets. They would really appreciate seeing excel sheets in presentations.

Invalid point: Formulae are easy to follow and audience can easily verify/reproduce your work.

My friend, excel rocks when MAKING a spreadsheet, but it can be hellishly annoying to follow. when you got a long chain of formulae cells, it is very annoying to trace the data through it to see where it is coming form. Sure, a properly labelled Sheet takes care of it, but that's not usually the case. That's the main reason i am very excited about that excel-sheet visualization tool posted here the other day.

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It may be hellishly annoying to follow (and trust me, I've had to clean up many Frankenstein-esque spreadsheets), but it's imo easier than any sort of messy code. Which do you think is harder for Average Joe Exec - following poorly documented and messy code, or following a poorly documented and messy spreadsheet?

PS I'm also very excited for that tool. Will make my life so much easier.

I agree with your valid point, re

>> Invalid point: Formulae are easy to follow and audience can easily verify/reproduce your work.

Actually this is another valid point of Excel.

Unless the financial model was done incorrectly (using VBA, complicated formula chains, unclear logic), it is very easy to verify financial model in Excel, which is a big plus.

Excel has been partly to blame for many bugs in mathematical models, in part because of its datatypes and in part because of its builtins. Some of these bugs are not at all easy to spot, depending on how you go about the building and the verifying.

What mathematical models? For your company financial assumptions and forecasts you generally need, in essence, the sum(...) function, percentages and multiplication, repeated ad nauseam, and if any of your formulas even have space for 'not easy to spot' bugs then the bug is in thinking of making such formulas in the first place.

Your spreadsheets would be big because of quantity of different things included, not because of complexity of those things

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