Thanks. Firstly, Rob, John and I wrote PED out of a passion for the technology - wanting to tell our story - rather than for (direct) financial gain. It took about 1 year full time for Rob and I, less for John. It’s paid its royalty, and the checks keep coming in - roughly enough to pay for my holiday each year.

For PED, a lot of things came together at the same time to make it ‘the right time’ for me to write a book, and the same situation is unlikely to recurr. So looking back, I would definitely do it again, but I now have no desire to write any more new books (just updates to the VBA Prog Ref and PED).

Financially, it’s only directly worth it if you have lots of titles that all sell well; JW can probably spend a year after each Office release updating his 40+ books, then live for the next few years off the royalties.

The major benefits, though, are indirect. A few years ago, a guy at Barclays Capital was reading the copy of PED he’d just bought when a CV with my name on passed across his desk. That got me the job, and I now run a global Excel development team for a large US bank.

Re - Commercial Tools

Sorry there are too many free bies on the net.

Look at ASAP, it was free for a long time (with 2 forced upgrades a year)

Today if you use it in a commercial organisation it needs to be registered (paid)…but I dont think most IS depts in large companies would consider buying ASAP….desptie the tons of time it would save…

As an Individual I dont mind 2 forced free upgrades….hence would not buy…

If you do decide to go with the commercial XL analyst…make sure its a COM addin or an XLAM and not XLA

I used Lightning Source printers and Amazon distribution so my margin per book is more than a publisher’s royalty, but less than ebook. Some authors don’t worry about ebook copying, figuring those people would never have bought it anyway.

Bill Jelen seems to publish quite a few books for other people in his series, although AFAICR the Amazon rankings are not high. There’s a formula for estimating sales from ranking; I used to look at my book’s ranking every day, after a year I just let the cheques / checks get lodged by LSI.

You’ve done well with the blog, there’s more posts here than on excelusergroup.org (I just posted a question there because Nick Hodge runs it and I wanted a database pov). Do you know how your stats compare to DailyDoseOfExcel?

I don’t think there is a next decades ss dev. I think ss dev could be a wild ride for the next few years. Then it will either be dead, or very lucrative, or possibly both.

So how/where would next decade’s spreadsheet developers learn their craft?

Harlan I’ve seen some of the BS (both meanings!) spreadsheet stuff, and its a million miles from the stuff I do. I mainly do financial reporting, which is just adding up really, but accountants being accountants have made it bloody complicated adding up (job security an’ all…). It is just adding up though.

That decision support stuff is much more thinking, much less spreadsheet wrestling. So even the possible 100/1,000 hours is probably not that relevant to the first job (or many of the others).

Valuing an oil well in a spreadsheet is great, thats exactly what my brother does, he does have an MBA, but he also has 20 years as a chartered geophysical engineer.

Most fresh faced MBA’s are going to be costing out changing stationery suppliers, not valuing billion dollar investments. But choosing between pencil sharpeners and self propelling pencils probably isn’t sexy enough for a student project.

I don’t think they get enough experience analysing real world amounts of data. If they did they might be more switched on to databases.

Simon says (bet he’s never heard that before) : “I agree though we need a lead from MS. Who thinks it will happen???”

I AM optimistic because I believe that the desktop Office environment is actually making a stronger and stronger story for Excel (and Access by the way but that’s an even more desperate situation) especially if they REALLY want Excel and Access to be THE major Providers to SharePoint. If the sources (aren’t properly designed and executed, then the whole thing sucks - and SP will lose. Therefore there will be a NEED for more small p and large P “professional” Excel and Access development as we envision it.

I believe MS will get it - in fact some of them may have already got it.

I want to see what the balance of this year brings. Remember that there was a major commitment to VBA made at the ODAC from Bill G (who was probably reflecting the opinions of his managers on that issue) and Richard McAneff. There HAD to be a reason for those statements, but I haven’t heard anything about it since, which is getting discouraging frankly. Was it just noise? We’ll see I guess.

Dick

Now just how much Excel development work would the top 1/3 of these students do as part of their US$150K or more (much more) starting salary jobs? There’s little question some of them will be making heavy use of fairly complex spreadsheets, and they may be building their own models from templates they learned while earning their MBAs, but how many of them would be developing spreadsheets other people would be using? And, taking a EUSPRIG angle, what would you suppose the error rates were in such spreadsheets?

10,000 hours may just about be right to gain some expertise if at least 3,000 of those hours had been spent on verification and error prevention. And an extra 1,000 on documentation would be useful too.

MS are so far up their arse wanting to ‘lead the services revolution’ they can’t see how far ahead of them their customers are using Excel. They are too busy re-solving problems as webbified services that were solved with Excel/Office in the nineties.

Add in the tick box SOX hatred of spreadsheets and it doesn’t look like the best career choice. (Or a great book topic!) (what about migrating off spreadsheets?)

I was under the impression that lots of business schools do teach spreadsheets, but maybe not development.

The banks are getting more and more dependent on Excel/VBA though, everytime I look at jobserve there are more, better paid jobs.

I agree though we need a lead from MS. Who thinks it will happen???