This is the first year you can sing “Happy Birthday” to Excel without having to pay a royalty, so that’s nice.
Here’s my uninteresting Excel story: My first spreadsheet program was SuperCalc. I remember we had orange screens on our PCs. Eventually we graduated to VGA monitors and Lotus 1-2-3 v.1A. I stuck with that version for a long time. I had tons of keystroke macros – whatever the heck those were called in Lotus – and I wasn’t giving them up. Excel burst onto the scene and I barely blinked. I don’t need that fancy new stuff. I used v.1A until 1992 and I think 1-2-3 was on v4 by then.
In 1992, I miraculously got a job at KPMG (nee Peat Marwick). Apple was a client of KPMG, so everyone got a Mac and used Office. It was like living in hell. I was a PC, Lotus 1-2-3 guy and I was forced to use these toys in business. Over time, I got used to my Mac Plus, then my SE30, then my PowerBook. And, of course, I got used to Excel and its obviously superior features to the version of 1-2-3 I was using. I don’t remember what version of Excel that was, I just know that most people in my office sucked at using it. Thankfully 25 years later, every office worker is, at a minimum, competent at Excel. What? That’s not true, you say? There are still people who work with Excel and aren’t competent? What the hell have they been doing for the last 25 years? It’s not like learning Excel is exactly cutting edge. End rant.
Being forced to use Office was probably a pivotal point in my life. (Using Macs in an accounting firm in the early ’90s was just stupid.) Pivotal though it was, I think what really turned me into an Excel geek was an intranet message board that KPMG had. I think they called it the KPMG Knowledgebase, but my memory isn’t so good. I could go on the message board and answer people’s questions about Excel. And I was hooked. Then it was on to newsgroups (nntp), a blog, and the crazy post-Microsoft newsgroup period that has mostly meant StackOverflow.com for me. What the heck did I do after MS closed the newsgroups but before SO? I don’t remember. I know I visited answers.microsoft.com once, saw a terrible answer from a moderator, and saw that the moderator had selected his own answer as “the” answer. I haven’t been back.
When I first started on the newsgroups, I was more of an Access guy than an Excel guy. I was surely answering more Access questions than Excel at the beginning. It was when I started reading Chip Pearson, Rob Bovey, Stephen Bullen, and others posting about VBA that the tables turned. I realize that Access has VBA, but the Excel object model was, and is, a thing of a beauty. I still do plenty of Access work, but it pales in comparison to the time I spend in Excel.
Other random memories:
- At my first MVP Summit, everyone thought I was going to be a 60-year-old guy and I was in my mid-thirties. I guess I came off as
cantankerousmature in my newsgroup postings. - I remember after a year of DDoE, a bunch of fellow Excellers joined as authors. There were some great posts back then.
- I remember applying for a job and taking an Excel and an Access test. I aced them both. The secretary was looking at me like I was a witch. (If you’re reading this blog, you could ace them too.)
- I remember planning an Australian Excel conference over beers and actually going through with it. If I had a nickel for every plan I made over beers that came to fruition, I’d have a nickel.