Introduction
First off, I'd like to say thanks Charles & Chris putting this wonderful site together and providing a home for my blog. Thanks guys!
I had the pleasure of working with Charles & Chris in Plural's Minneapolis office back in 1997 and 1998. This same Plural office, by the way, was also the professional home of John Durant before he moved out to Redmond. Anyway, that's why Charles was so nice to me! He has to like my Excel VBA book - he was a huge influence to me regarding Excel/VBA development.
I wrote another book, Mastering Excel 2000 Premium Edition (Sybex 1998) with Mindy Martin and Beth Klinger in 1998. Any guesses as to who the editor was? (answer). A good editor like Melanie Spiller has a huge impact on a book. In my experience, reading an author's raw manuscript is kind of like looking out a dirty window. You can see what's outside, but you can't really enjoy the view. Melanie adds tremendous value by cleaning the window so that the dirt on the window doesn't detract from your reading experience.
I work for Dakota Technology Group , a firm that I founded in 1998 to deliver compelling, creative, analytical solutions to my clients. Back in the 90's, we were primarily doing a lot of Excel/VBA development and building financial models. While my firm still does a lot of that type of work, the way we deliver solutions has changed dramatically. We have evolved the process and realized the benefits of using Microsoft Analysis Services to handle aggregation, pivoting data, time series analysis, and other data manipulation chores that would otherwise require us to write lots of stored procedures, queries, and other mundane data access procedures. We have also embraced a much broader toolset in order to either extend the reach of our applications or to shorten the development time frame.