My Actuarial Working Life

I started looking for a replacement Visual FoxPro ("VFP") since 2013, especially I noticed that Microsoft is going to cease its support on VFP 9.0 (released in 2004 and updated in 2007) after 13 January 2015. Although such technical support is not a concern to me (I never requested any support from Microsoft during my more than 10 years of experience using VFP for my actuarial work), I noticed that it would be more and more difficult for me to convince my clients (those who are not existing VFP users) to consider VFP in designing solutions for them. When I did my research on the website, I came across many names that I was totally not familiar… Is " Lightswitch " mentioned in the official VFP website suitable? After studying its features, I concluded that it is perhaps a good application for an IT programmer, but it is too much for me in handling actuarial work. Basically, what I need in my work is to manipulate and analyze data, ideally using common programming l...

If you are a frequent Prophet user, you must be definitely familiar with "Model Point Files" ("MPF"), i.e. the policy data that you compile in a specific format that Prophet can recognize as inputs for Prophet runs. If my guess is right, most probably you use Data Conversion System ("DCS") to convert the source data you download from your policy administration system (may be in various format, e.g. fixed ASCII / fixed width, comma delimited, tab delimited, etc.) into the required MPF, based on the definitions you specified in your DCS programs. In case your source data are divided into various files, you may need to carry out more steps to prepare MPF, for example: Open different source files in Excel Combine required fields from different source files by using commands (such as) VLOOKUP, SUMIF & MATCH. You may have automated this process by using VBA. Convert the required files into text files Use DCS to convert those text files into MPF  How...