18.1 Introduction

Modern risk management requires accurate, fast and flexible computing environments. To meet this demand a vast number of software packages evolved over the last decade, accompanying a huge variety of programming languages, interfaces, configuration and output possibilities. One solution especially designed for large scale explorative data analysis is XploRe , a procedural programming environment, equipped with a modern client/server architecture (Härdle et al. (1999) and Härdle et al. (2000)).

As far as flexibility in the sense of openness and accuracy is concerned XploRe has a lot to offer a risk analyst may wish. On the contrary its matrix oriented programming language (Fickel; 2001) might be seen as a drawback in respect to other computational approaches. In terms of learning curve effects and total cost of ownership an alternative solution seems desirable.

This chapter will present and demonstrate the net based spreadsheet solution M D *ReX designed for modern statistical and econometric analysis. We concentrate on examples of Value-at-risk (VaR) with copulas and means of quantifying implied volatilities presented in Chapter 2 and 6. All results will be shown in Microsoft Excel.

Recent research work suggests that the rationale for spreadsheet based statistical computing is manifold. Ours is to bring state-of-the-art quantitative methods to the fingertips of spreadsheet users. Throughout this chapter we will give a short introduction into our underlying technology, briefly explain the usage of the aforementioned spreadsheet solution and provide applications of this tool.