In 2014, I started working at Barclays in New York City as an Investment Banking Analyst. During our eight-week training, there was a funny competition: you were given a spreadsheet in all black and white with messed up formatting and you had to, using only Excel keyboard shortcuts, reformat the entire workbook. I remember the person in my class who won. He clearly put the most time into practicing, probably staying up all night to be great at – what would become – a large part of his job: formatting things to look nice. When he won, he snapped his fingers like the kids do when they solve a Rubik’s cube. It’s something I won’t forget because I smiled at how happy he was when he broke the record by 0.8 seconds set by some Analyst at Bank of America. If you google Training the Streets, you can watch somebody ferociously format the sample file in 23 seconds.

As a quick aside if you're an engineer reading this story thinking "WTF IS THIS INDUSTRY"...programmers actually have a similar leaderboard to showcase skills that employers encourage: it's called being Gold on Leetcode. Just like the Training the Streets formatting exercise bankers do mentioned above, Leetcode forms the basis of tech interview questions. People show off how much leetcode they've done on Youtube. It's an equivalent badge of honor. The equivalent to Excel shortcuts for programmers is vim -- which lets you move around with only your keyboard in the terminal. I love vim and Excel shortcuts. They are both incredible workflow boosters.

Why did I share that story? From the get go it was obvious that these shortcuts were a key part of doing your job excellently. The first day at my actual desk (I worked in Global Industrials, so an M&A coverage group), the first thing you’re told by other Analysts is to “pop off” the F1 key. “It’ll only slow you down when you’re using the shortcuts” was the rationale. Mmm….okay. If this makes me look cool and efficient at my job, then off the key goes. Wow, now I am a real one. The next group of incoming Analysts will know that I’m at the top of my class.

It’s true: I was impressed with the speed at which other bankers navigated Excel. Moving around was a badge of honor. After all, it meant that you could get the job done faster than anybody else which is certainly correlated with how good you are perceived to be. We often want to turn around materials quickly and operate on tight deadlines. What would take a person without using the shortcuts two hours you could do in one hour, and spend that remaining hour grabbing coffee and chatting about your upcoming list of career prospects in Private Equity. I kid!

So why am I writing about this in 2022? While shortcuts in Excel have saved Analysts millions of hours of time, a lot of other tasks in the day to day work of financial analysts still need shortcuts. Finance professionals spend the majority of their time switching between the Microsoft Office Suite: PDF, PPT, Word, and of course Excel. It turns out there are no shortcuts for a lot of the other parts of the workflow.

After Investment Banking, I saw the same thing happening in Private Equity. Holistically, both are industries where appearance of your work very much matters. The strategic part of your presentation (which is the real value add) will not be taken as seriously if the slides look like they are disheveled.

Gridlines is building process improvements that will make finance professionals much faster day-to-day. Our goal is to save 25M hours for finance professionals this year. Ambitious, but sadly achievable!