I thought about calling this post, “The Meaning of Life: Excel Edition”, as Excel has played such an important part of my life.
My lifelong journey with spreadsheets began in college. Back then, I assigned portions of assignments to different members of my group and asked them to give me their work in SuperCalc format. I then assembled and integrated everything into a single project. That was my first real glimpse of how powerful spreadsheets could be, a skill I expanded in my first job at Deloitte.
It was the late 1980s, and I quickly discovered that working with spreadsheets was more fun than doing normal accounting work. I drafted audit schedules and even learned to program using macros in Lotus 1-2-3. That curiosity led me to my first true spreadsheet job in Huntsville, Alabama, at Intergraph, where I handled international consolidations in SuperCalc 5. In that role, I both leveraged and expanded my spreadsheet skills. Within a year, I had automated all spreadsheet reporting and took on additional responsibilities for automating some reports for our corporate reporting department.
At Intergraph, I saw my first graphical spreadsheet—Wingz from Informix—and I thought it was terrible. Keyboard support was non-existent, which slowed everything down compared to the “slash” commands used in the DOS spreadsheet products.
That perception completely changed the first time I used Excel. I led the effort to standardize on Excel at Intergraph, where I managed international consolidations for 45 subsidiaries. In those days, I had the very first true PC in the company. It was on a cart that was supposed to be shared by the entire Finance Department—but it lived in my office. That’s where I got my first real hands-on experience with Excel, starting with version 4.0. From then on, Excel was central to my career.
Initially, I learned macros in Excel using the old XLM language, which felt natural after my experience with SuperCalc. But when Excel 5 introduced VBA in 1994, I dove in headfirst and started doing things that had never been done before. I was probably the first person to hook up Excel to Oracle Financials in a pivot table during the Excel 5 beta program! That also gave me a glimpse of the possibilities spreadsheets opened up. It also exposed some of the complexities, as the SQL query for that pivot table required a nine-table join.
My passion for Excel only grew stronger when I attended Microsoft TechEd in 1993 and met some of my Excel heroes. Around the same time, I started answering questions in the CompuServe Excel forum, which became my first real experience with community support. I’d read questions in the evening, experiment at work the next day, and then return with answers.
Before long, Microsoft recognized a few of us CompuServe forum contributors as MVPs, or “Most Valuable Professionals.” At the time, none of us really knew what that meant. All we knew was that we were getting T-shirts and trinkets for doing what we loved: helping people use Excel better. Still, it was quite an honor, as there were only five of us “Charter MVPs” in the entire world.
Excel opened doors I couldn’t have imagined. In late 1994, I left Intergraph to do Excel consulting, building Excel-based applications for companies, including Microsoft itself. Some of those applications were used personally by Bill Gates.
It was during this time that I encountered Essbase, which used Excel as its original interface. I wrote the first demoware for Essbase, the “Open Budget Pak,” a project funded by Microsoft to demonstrate Excel as a user interface for a database. After that product was complete, Arbor Software, the inventors of Essbase, sent me around the country working on the user interface side of high-profile Essbase projects. That experience was the spark that eventually led me to start Applied OLAP.
The first customer of Applied OLAP was a company in the telecommunications industry that used Essbase for reporting, but had an Excel-based budgeting system comprised of 1,200 linked Excel workbooks. That system was impossible to maintain, so I engineered and built a custom budgeting system for them using Visual Basic. The maze of linked workbooks I encountered there inspired me to create a product. Once I finished my work, I began conceptualizing our first product, ActiveOLAP, which was later adopted by numerous companies in the early 2000s.
Our flagship product, Dodeca, was born out of this journey. The idea came from decades of working with companies that used spreadsheets not just as tools, but as full-fledged, mission-critical systems. With Dodeca, we set out to standardize, automate, and streamline spreadsheet processes—reducing errors, saving time, and turning Excel into a true enterprise platform.
Forty years after its release, Excel has made a profound impact on my life. It gave me a career, introduced me to a global community, and led me to create products that continue to shape how businesses use data today.
If not for Excel, I honestly don’t know where I’d be. What I do know is that my life wouldn’t have been nearly as rich as it has been so far. I’m grateful that Microsoft invented Excel, and I’m proud of the path it set me on.
Let’s go back to the start of this post and my comment on Excel and the meaning of life. Look again at the formula and say, in English, what this formula is calculating.
That’s right—it reads, ‘To be, or not to be’! Ironically, no matter what numeric or Boolean value you place into cell $B$2, it always evaluates to TRUE. So, according to Excel, the ‘meaning of life’ is simply… truth.
Happy birthday, Excel—here’s to the next 40 years.
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