Dear all, I see companies use software to calculate financial ratios and some simply use excel tools. Software is good for time savings and security database management but i don’t think it is the best tool for analyzing something deeply. How do you think about analyzing software advantages and disadvantages in practice? Thank you!
Which one is better for building a house, a hammer or a saw?
a hammer. You can threaten the builder with it far more effectively.
Hammer, saw adding to brick, concrete, sand, builders and many other thing 
Guys, you seem having chance joking with my question. I have never worked on analyzing work yet, so this question suddenly cross my mind. I wonder whether a skillful analyst depend too much on software solving data or not? Or he/she can quickly skim financial reports and know everything about company history. I want to check if software is really useful or not? So angrrry with your joking 
The best analysts use an abacus
Abacus to the Maximus
The main issue with software is that you often are stuck with whatever has been pre-programmed into it. With excel, you can change things around depending on issues specific to the industry or company you are working on. So knowing how to do this stuff in excel is useful. On the other hand, some things are hard to do in excel. Running bunches of multivariate regressions or testing time series can be done, but is a massive pain in the b*tt, so statistical software is nice for that. Some programs come with better data manipulation tools than excel allows. I remember Joey saying something interesting about “if you want to evaluate a hedge fund’s organizational ability, ask them how much of their process is done in Excel.” If it’s mostly done in Excel… run away as fast as you can. (I’m paraphrasing here, but that was the idea).