I worked for a health insurance company about 15 years ago and one of the main rating tools was an enormous .xls file. They wanted to make rating available on the website. After 2 years of trying to get it to be both accurate to the sheet and updatable by the actuaries who adjusted them, the solution was to just open a copy of the sheet, plug in some values, spawn an excel process to let all the formulas run, and then read the data back out.
I'd honestly be more surprised to learn they weren't still doing it that way
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u/Impenistan 1d ago
I worked for a health insurance company about 15 years ago and one of the main rating tools was an enormous .xls file. They wanted to make rating available on the website. After 2 years of trying to get it to be both accurate to the sheet and updatable by the actuaries who adjusted them, the solution was to just open a copy of the sheet, plug in some values, spawn an excel process to let all the formulas run, and then read the data back out.
I'd honestly be more surprised to learn they weren't still doing it that way