Risk Management Questions and Answers

Excel is quite powerful as it is at the same time a small portable database, has a user interface with very gentle learning curve and offers reasonable macro/VisualBasic scripting ability for "power" users.

These features have made it over the years the ultimate tactical solution to many small scale calculation challenges. Many businesses / business lines never move beyond this stage because of any of the following reasons:

• the costs associated with more strategic solutions (whether a vendor system or an in-house code base) exceed the perceived benefits. Excel is "already paid" by the MS Office license
  
• they don't have the inclination, need or requirement to pin down their analytics into more robust platforms. For example to program a calculation in python you'd need to have it properly described - you'd be surprised to see how many important analyses have no more documentation than the sheet they are built on
  
• it offers an illusion of transparency to non-programmers (it is only an illusion because if the sheet uses VB and complicated arrangements of values across sheets it may be more difficult to parse than procedural code)
  

The power of excel comes with some pretty lethal drawbacks. To name a few:

• lack of version control - you pretty soon end up with multiple sheets spread over multiple users
  
• spread-out formulas that can be anywhere and interact in any which way. this is a serious problem if the calculations need to be formally validated and audited