Thursday, June 5, 2008

Late Night Jammin

So it's 1:30 AM and I'm basically waiting on another analyst to finish one last page of a deck so I can get out of here. Things were pretty slow all day today until about 4PM, when I got staffed on a deal that has to be done tomorrow. I basically just had to profile some companies, gather financial data from 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and research reports (for the forward-looking estimates). The problem is that the formatting is sometimes really tricky to get just right. Little changes mess up the formatting and that's where I spent the majority of my time tonight. It's really frustrating when some Office program won't do what you think it's supposed to be doing.

I thought for a little while that tonight might be my first all-nighter, but it ended up that I got through the second half of pages much faster than the first. Once I figured out where to get the data and how to put it together, things went really fast.

I'm already getting faster at Excel navigation. It seems kind of funny to make a big deal of it, but seriously it saves you so much time not to use the mouse. About six months ago one of my friends and I decided to start only using Excel through the keyboard. That was a great decision. I learned tons of shortcuts that are really helping now. That's one area that I am WAY ahead of the other interns on. Of course, the bank does have its own special shortcuts which are really nice, but if you already know all the other shortcuts then learning a few more is no big deal. It is pretty amazing to watch the second-year analysts getting around in Excel. They go so fast that things just pop up on the screen - you can't even follow what they're doing.

Well I'm tired and I don't have much of anything important to write about, I just thought that since I have a few minutes I could write some things down while I wait. This is the second night in a row where I've been here pretty late. I can't complain though; I would much rather be busy than be sitting around out here. This is exactly what I want to be doing.

2 comments:

ShallWeShagNowOrShagLater said...

Hi!
Great post, as usual.
Just a question: are you using excel 2007 or 2003 at your office ?
Thanks for your answer :)

Anonymous said...

how did your CFA go?