I made a similar thread a little while back where the question was about professional alternatives to Excel, i.e., commercial software. I didn't do anything more there and stayed with my current solution and improving it with the help of my original programmer team and another external guy.
My current operation looks like this:
1. Collect 1-minute data from IQ Feed using QCollector. Data is stored as *.csv.
Tradeworks Software (
2. Perform statistical analysis using proprietary/custom designed software in C# with *.csv file from above. Data is stored in SQL DB.
3. Load data in Excel.
4. Excel is used for analyis/filtering/data exploration.
While I have gained more proficiency using this, I find that in the end it involves a bit too many steps and takes a bit too much time to upload. Excel seems to work fine now, although loading the data takes a bit too long for my taste and Excel can freeze at times. Thanks to help from a guy that's good with VBA I have however improved it greatly.
I'm considering ways to improve my current set-up. Even a complete re-write from scratch.
Without having all details - can anyone think of any suggestions?
I can't imagine going away from spreadsheet analysis, but would it make sense to use other software/solutions for this than Excel?
The best would of course be a solution that's completely integrated.
Or maybe I should strive towards combining steps 1-3 or somehow streamlining those and stay with Excel for analysis. I'm sure the way data is loaded into Excel could be improved also.
Bottom line I think is that Excel isn't that bad as soon as I have the data loaded. With a few clever macros/VBA it's pretty easy to do pretty much what I want with the data. It's the prior steps and the actual loading of data which is troublesome.