Excel add-in: The Big Picture

We have developed our plug-in for MS Excel so that analysts can remain in their natural environment – with a spreadsheet and a PDF viewer in front of them. The plugin does not change anything in the way analysts do their analysis. Analysts can manipulate their spreadsheet in original company reports, including all notes and disclosures, exactly the way they usually do. The enhancements in the process include the following.

The plugin installation process  is very straight-forward but you have to make sure you use the same login details to log into https://data.exerica.com/ and in the Exerica ribbon of your Excel (see Setting up Excel add-in for more detail). This should be enough to connect your Excel to your browser and enjoy all the interactive features of our innovative solution for Excel (see Excel and Angular web app integration to find out more about the architecture of the entire solution)

Analysts can simply copy any numbers in the original company report and paste those numbers directly into their spreadsheet. By doing this, they insert  ExrcP() formulas (i.e. UDF  functions rather than values), which return the required values and link Excel cells to the Exerica system. The formula in its simplest format is a function of three variables: company name, date, and parameter ID. The latter is not intended to be amended by the user. It identifies the data point within the company accounts and represents Exerica’s internal ID. ExrcP() formulas can be manipulated (spread, copied, pasted etc.) like other Excel formulae. Analysts can get the relevant number for another date or period simply by changing the third parameter of the formula.

In the demo video below we use the “To References” function to replace the hardcoded dates in the formulas with the respective cell references so that formulas become spreadable.