While at school I enjoyed writing simple programs in BASIC.  These were the days when schools had a large mainframe computer, VIC20s and Commodore 64s were the computers we used at school, and small personal computers used cassette tapes as storage devices.

While at university, I used computers to simulate physics experiments and to find numerical solutions to various problems by writing programs in BASIC.  I also used programs to solve other problems like finding solutions to various puzzles.

When I was first exposed to Excel in 1998, I took to it like a duck to water. I particularly enjoyed using macros to automate tasks.  For example, in my first role as an analyst, the previous person in the role was working 50+ hours per week for the first two weeks of every month doing month end reporting.  I automated many of these reports so that they were run within the first couple of days.

In many businesses there is tremendous untapped potential to save time through both improving Excel skills and through automating frequent tasks and reporting.  It is fantastic to see some businesses appreciating this.