QuantLibXL - The First Day

I only discovered QuantLib yesterday. The potential of the initiative is fantastic and the quality of the work is outstanding. What is missing is documentation that can be understood by beginners in quantitative finance and people who have no experience in using such libraries.
I therefore decided to record my own humble beginnings, including my mistakes and errors, in order to help others to progress a bit faster in the future. Perhaps in the near future I can turn this blog into proper documentation in the form of a WIKI or a book - Quantlib for Beginners.

I will start to explore the library using a port for Excel called QuantLibXL assuming that Excel would provide a simple user interface to the library functions.

So let's start off by exploring QuantLibXL in Excel.

I installed QuantLibXL within minutes following the instructions. On my machine the installed created the QuantLibXL directory in c:\Program Files\ and I could install the .xll file in Excel 2003 without any problems.

After the Add-In was successfully loaded I tested the availability of QuantLib by typing

=qlVersion()

in a worksheet cell and pressing ENTER.
Quantlib responded with

0.9.0

I then tried

=qlXLVersion()

QuantLib responded with

QuantLibXL 0.9.0

QuantLib was avaliable from Excel!

I then proceeded with trying out random functions and modules listed on the QuantLibXL website: http://quantlib.org/quantlibxl/auto/all_functions.html

The best way to discover the required inputs for a function is to key in the function name and then click on the Function Wizard (the little fx button on the Formular Bar). It lists the required arguments for a function.

Difficulties arise when QuantLib required other objects as arguments or certain constants. At this point the dependencies between various classes are not clear to me. Also I could not see which constants were expected by certain functions, so I tried to guess or get some of them by the sample workbooks which are provided with QuantLibXL.

A class diagram wor QuantLib would be helpful. It seems like Luigi Ballabio, one of the founders of Quantlib made the beginning by writing a book called Implementing QuantLib which is an excellent introduction. Unfortunately only three chapters of the book are available.