Does anyone have a real-life example of a seemingly complicated Excel formula?
The background is that I'm writing a blog post that talks about spreadsheets, and I want an example that shows that formulas can be just as complex as any programming language (my point is that it'll be even more so in Excel, since there isn't much in the way of formatting).
If you have an example to share, I'd love to see it. I would prefer to include a real-life example rather than something contrived.
@loke I don't have it at hand, and I only saw it at a distance, but I know of at least one spreadsheet that existed in the mid-90s for feeding in some characteristics (length, width, I dunno) of a fast sailing boat, and get out all the dimensions needed for the blueprint.
I have also heard wild rumours about the spreadsheets used by some financial traders.
@vatine@loke I've worked adjacent to such financial spreadsheets: Risk-managed billions in exotic equity derivatives via spreadsheets with custom plugins to call out to compute grid, dozens of tabs laid out with financial maths. Overnight risk calculations were VBA to tweak inputs and recalc sheet (simulated annealing of input tweak order to minimise recalc cost). Custom allocator to stop Excel memory fragmentation in 2G address space.
A fully-fledged, complex program in a RAD environment.
@loke
I once studied an instrumental conditioning model of animal behavior implemented as an Mac Excel spreadsheet (it turned out to rely on a bug in that old Mac-specific version; it was not a good model).
But while the model was complex the complexity was spread out; individual cells weren't that long or complicated. I suspect that is often the case.
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