this is an essential tool for professional financial analysts

Pros: The product has a relatively broad scope, but I typically limit myself to use of its banking and date functions. This add-in's implementation of loan functions is very detailed and exacting to industry-standard methodologies. This is the only implementation I've found that offers all the types of bond and loan types that my treasury analysts require, and provides the exact results that they get when they devote an entire worksheet to one debt series. Many of the functions are implemented to offer their use as array functions, which results in extremely high speed functional response for large forecasting models.

The author also provides very quick, personal responses to queries of the various functions in the library, and has demonstrated a strong willingness to develop new functions or offer improved capabilities to his existing functions.

Cons: There's not anything I can criticize about the product itself. The only caution I can suggest is that some of the functions have a large number of input parameters, many of which will result in subtly incorrect answers. The complex calculations inherent in these functions are difficult to model manually in Excel, and the user is cautioned to test the function's results carefully to ensure the correct parameter values have been used.

Posted: 21-Sep-2006 04:53:59 PM