Chapter 3. Advanced Topics

Introduction

Because of their flexibility and power, spreadsheets have become the general-purpose tool of choice for virtually every investor. In the past, the dividing line between spreadsheets and databases was clearly defined by size limitations. Those lines have become somewhat blurred. Technical analysis experiments involving fewer than one million records are often easier to construct with a spreadsheet than a database. In this regard it is difficult to distinguish between a database table and a worksheet. For example, a set of records that contains the daily open, high, low, close, and volume for all members of the S&P 500 for five years would occupy 630,000 rows—considerably less than Excel’s 1,000,000-row limit. Moreover, our simple data table....