Remote Windows Installation for Excel work

[Raz316]

Hi all,

my boss uses Excel to do various marketing analytics and it has come to a point where his PC (which I recall is relatively high spec) struggles with the work. He does not want to stop using Excel (just yet), so I was wondering if anyone has been in this position and used a remote installation of windows to do the number crunching?

VPS.net lets you rent a relatively high spec server on a daily basis, so I am considering doing this and installing office on it.

So, has anyone done something similar before? Was it worthwhile?

Ta!

[TheAnimus]

This is something done by all banks (those that claim otherwise are lieing, or ignorant of what people are really doing), every second of every day.

There are many ways of grid'ing this out, some cloud providers exist targetting this market, hell even microsoft have things in place around their HPC system for doing just this with excel.

However, more often than not the person who made these sheets can get a serious performance boost by having a proper engineer (NOT quant) look at it and fix it up. Simple things like changing one critical method from been byval to byref can create speed boosts of factors in the hundreds, avoid the need for any complex farming.

So before you look at clouding this out, which has many costs not often captured up front (legal ramifications of data is a classic) you might want to look at getting someone for a week to do some analysis and see what is going on, however the downside is, most good people at that will charge £5k for just a week for on site work.

Also you often will find you need one day a month ongoing to be able to keep the data running smoothly as frequently the users, when given a faster chrunching spreedsheet want more types of crunching to be done!

[Raz316]

Thanks TheAnimus. Just updating to say I've just given Amazon EC2 a go to see if in practice it will work and it will! There is something quite irritating about the most basic and free Windows AMI still appearing to run faster than my actual machine...

As for looking at the spreadsheet, I believe this was done and there wasn't anything that could be changed (all calculations are done within the spreadsheet and not via VBA).

You mention legal ramifications of data, does that mean as in having sensitive data on a third party host without permission from the source of said data?

[TheAnimus]

You mention legal ramifications of data, does that mean as in having sensitive data on a third party host without permission from the source of said data?

Yes, it depends on the license but say you are buying data from BloomingExpensiveBurg, they might limit you geographically as to where the data can be used.

Then you also have your own data and privacy policies, whoever is the data protection officer is should be made aware of this and the security considerations.

Also if you had someone have a look at the sheet and they said it couldn't be sped up because its all "in sheet" the person was in all probability not very good.

[Raz316]

Thanks again TheAnimus! I'll mention the spreadsheet thing again. I've barely ever used Excel (luckily?) so I am very much just on the side lines shrugging for this one.

The data we are using is our own, so I am happy with that, but thanks for flagging it up!