In the Corporate Finance world, accountants and analyst often perform calculations over large data sets using Excel or Access.
Typically a finance task will consist the below steps:
- Pull data from an ERP system
- Perform calculations and transformations on that data
- Prepare a presentation quality report
Generally speaking, Excel is great for step 3- preparing presentation
quality reports. Access, on the other hand, performs poorly on all three steps. I
recommend using R to pull data and perform calculations, and then use Excel to prepare the final report.
The below table compares the performance of each software on
the steps of a typically finance task.
Pulling Data
|
Performing Calculations
|
Preparing Final Reports
|
|
R
|
Fast. Highly scalable. Easy. See RODBC package.
|
Fast. Highly scalable. Easy. See SQLDF package.
|
Not implemented as far as I am aware.
|
Excel
|
Not scalable. Difficult to use.
|
Not scalable. Easy to use if approximately one to three
tables.
|
Easy to use. Professional quality.
|
Access
|
Slow. Not scalable. Difficult to use.
|
Slow. Not scalable. Difficult to use.
|
Hard to use. Poor quality output.
|