Why Microsoft Excel won’t die

Discussion in 'Trading Software' started by themickey, Oct 18, 2024.

  1. newwurldmn

    newwurldmn

    you should have had 2 extra developers to test your program.
     
    #51     Oct 18, 2024
    Drawdown Addict likes this.
  2. Peter8519

    Peter8519

    I have a process that I go through after each trading day and results are ported to formatted Excel spreadsheet with charts.
    Amibroker exploration(screening) -> perl script to crunch the data -> dump results to Excel.
    Excel VBA is good for prototyping before I plunge into perl script. With Selenium web driver, Excel VBA can pretty much scrape data from any web page.

    Here is a link to Traders' Tips. Stock Charting with Excel.
    TRADERS’ TIPS - NOVEMBER 2024
     
    #52     Oct 18, 2024
    Ninja likes this.
  3. Since you obviously can put things together I can recommend the following:

    - C# with playwright for your scrapping. You will never look at Selenium again.

    - lightweight charts from trading view and gojs for statistics. Both free and web based.

    - You can get rid of Excel.

    - You can communicate your scripts with the web UI via Socket IO.

    That way you would leave the eighties behind. Rock music is still the best IMHO.
     
    #53     Oct 18, 2024
    Peter8519 likes this.
  4. SunTrader

    SunTrader

    or like you said in previous sentence .... "don't bother to look for anything else when something does the job."

    It does the job, for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.

    It is our best option. Move on.
     
    #54     Oct 19, 2024
  5. Peter8519

    Peter8519

    After much thought, it's no bueno. I have thousand lines of perl code and porting to C# is no simple task. Not to mention relearning C# and playwright. Ditching Excel means learning SQL to replace Excel pivot table.
     
    #55     Oct 19, 2024
  6. Thousands of lines in perl.
    Use of Excel pivot table.

    I feel sorry for you, that must be a pain to fix.
     
    #56     Oct 19, 2024
  7. themickey

    themickey

    How do you know it's broken?
     
    #57     Oct 19, 2024
  8. #58     Oct 19, 2024
  9. Peter8519

    Peter8519

    Indeed, at a glance perl has 889, java 859, Visual Basic 850, Javascript 675, PHP 629, Python 311 etc.

    Javascript ranks 4th but it's the most popular.
    Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023

    It all depends on one's familiarity with the programming language. I am using Activestate Perl 5.20 and it was obsoleted many years ago. All the modules in the PPM are outdated. I could have upgraded to Strawberry with all the latest modules but choose not to. So, perl is not broken. For that matter, Excel is not broken and Selenium driver is still keeping up with Chrome changes. Of course, hunting for new chromedriver.exe is pain.

    From the historical trend of programming software, new one will pop up here and there, and old ones will be replaced. This will impact those who selling their software service. I was happy with Excel VBA until the spreadsheets gotten too big. perl array can handle much larger table than Excel and faster. All my EOD and Edgar downloads are done with perl. Of course, python is far better than perl in machine learning.
     
    #59     Oct 19, 2024
    Drawdown Addict likes this.
  10. Notice that my recommendation about using c# scores as very likebale in that list.

    I am not trying to give myself a pat in the back, but using c# with playwright will give you great results.

    Then you can send anything to a local mysql database for your calculations, and excel can go away.

    Playwright has a code generator, you don't have to code your scrapper yourself. It gets your clicks on any website and generates code for it.
     
    #60     Oct 19, 2024