April 2nd marks the fourth anniversary of the start of my career as full time Excel developer. In my previous life I was a metallurgist, doing research into aerospace materials, but the company I was with was faltering after an ill-advised merger and a subsequent near-merger that sapped its spirit. I took a new job at a large manufacturing facility to work on process development, but the day after I started the new job, the World Trade Center came down, all of our markets hit the skids, the manufacturing environment became grim, and the employer began to suck the life from its workforce.

I’d been doing some free-lance programming, five or ten hours a week, and had gotten a taste for it. In fact I’ve developed small apps for myself since I first used computers in college, and I’d been programming in Excel since version 4.0. I imagined what it would be like to work in Excel full time, but I had kids in grade school and a house I could barely afford. This was not a time to quit one’s job to start something so different.

This all changed on Friday, 2 April, 2004. My employer had been having weekly layoffs for longer than my 2.5 years there, and this week was no different – with one notable exception. I was one of the lucky ones, and got to go home early that day. I actually went in and thanked my boss and his boss for laying me off. The misery had been lifted.

Two days later, I flew off to Redmond to the annual Microsoft MVP Summit. I’d been planning the trip, and had non-refundable tickets, so I wasn’t going to skip the opportunity to go to a conference full of developers, for the first time as a developer. The Summit also was an appropriate punctuation mark for my change of careers.

I’m not the greatest businessman, but I’ve discovered a good market for an all-around Excel user. Despite my emphasis on charting and data visualization, most of my work is in automation of routine tasks, and the time saved by my projects is what clients appreciate most. Working for myself totally beats working for the man, especially when “the man” is as demented as my last employer.

I work mostly on a lot of smaller projects for a wide variety of clients. They range from Fortune 50 to sole proprietorships, they come from the North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa. I don’t know if I have clients in South America, but I have contacts there I regularly communicate with. Antarctica is off my list. The clients are in finance, marketing, engineering, science, and other fields, and I learn something from each project, about either a client, or a market, or a new programming approach. I have written some general purpose utilities, some of which are almost ready for commercial release, and I’ve edited several books. Some people tell me I should write a book, but that sounds like a lot of work. But if I build up a cushion, who knows.

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