My name is Richard Goeggel. I am a C.P.A., located in Houston, Texas. I’ve had a long career in a variety of industries in finance and accounting. A common thread has been my passion for using data to create actionable information to improve decision making. I’ve launched 3MinExcel.com as a way to share that passion with others. I hope you will find it useful.
A little history…
I studied computer science in college back in the early 1970s. In those days, computer programming involved using procedural languages such as assembler language, Fortran and PL/1. It was tedious, and involved hours of flowcharting, programming and debugging to accomplish even simple tasks.
In the early 1980s I was an accountant, working for a large national company. My boss gave me one of the original IBM PCs and Lotus 1-2-3, one of the first spreadsheet programs. He asked me to play with it to see if it might be useful. At first, I recall being frustrated that I couldn’t find anywhere to create a program. I read the manual and thought about it and it suddenly dawned on me that a spreadsheet was actually just a pad of paper and a calculator. For the first time, someone could use a computer without knowing anything about programming! Very quickly I was creating presentations and reports that would be considered crude today, but were revolutionary at the time.
I was hooked! I’ve been an avid user and teacher of spreadsheets ever since. Over the years I’ve created countless budgets, cash flow projections, analytical models and financial dashboards. They were often large, complex spreadsheets containing innumerable formulas. Unfortunately, they could be difficult to understand and maintain. Thankfully, Excel has evolved over the years and now has sophisticated graphics and analytical tools built-in. Just as the original PC gave the power of computing to non-programmers, Excel contains powerful features to access, manipulate and analyze data without being a “power user.”
Why 3MinExcel.com?
This site is dedicated to sharing the power of Excel. We will start at the most basic level, and progress to exploring the data model and its related tools. For those of you (like me) that still insist on programming, we’ll explore visual basic (VBA) and look at some of the things you can accomplish with it.
You will also find brief tutorials to answer some commonly asked questions about Excel. I’ll try to keep each of these to 3 minutes or less, hence the 3MinExcel.com site name, but don’t be surprised if a few go over.