Spreadsheet Day Celebration - The History of Excel

Access link: After you register for the session, the link will appear on the video camera icon (online event.)
Come a few minutes early to enjoy some extra fun!

As Debra Dalgleish (Contextures, Excel M.V.P.) explains on her Spreadsheet Day Blog (spreadsheet-day.com/blog/about/) October 17 was chosen as the annual Spreadsheet Day because VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers, was released on October 17, 1979. Spreadsheet Day was proposed by Debra to celebrate "the joy and challenges of working with spreadsheets" and was first celebrated in 2010.

In commemoration of 2020's Spreadsheet Day, the MS Excel Toronto Meetup Group is holding a one-of-a-kind session to take you on a time travel through the Excel history. We will hear about the creation and launching of the first spreadsheet in the market, historical key episodes of Excel's exceptional components development, and what the Microsoft Excel Team is currently working on and planning for the near future.

Bill Jelen, aka Mr. Excel, is co-hosting this session with Celia Alves, interviewing some of the crucial players who made Microsoft Excel the incredible tool we all love to use.

This session is jam-packed with surprises! We truly hope you can join us live on October 14, 2020, from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM EST, to hear the pure gems that each of our fantastic guests has to share about their contribution to what Microsoft Excel is or is about to be.

Bill Jelen is the host of MrExcel.com (mrexcel.com) and the author of 60 books about Microsoft Excel, including Excel Gurus Gone Wild, Pivot Table Data Crunching, and Excel 2019 Inside Out. He has made over 80 guest appearances on T.V.'s Call for Help with Leo Laporte. Bill also writes the Excel column for Strategic Finance magazine. On YouTube, he has produced over 2200 episodes of his daily video podcast Learn Excel from MrExcel. Before founding MrExcel.com in 1998, Jelen spent twelve years "in the trenches" as a financial analyst for a publicly held company's accounting, finance, marketing, and operations departments. For his outstanding contribution to the Excel Community, Bill has been awarded M.V.P. by Microsoft for the past 16 years, allowing him to closely follow the Microsoft Excel program's development and offer his feedback to the Excel engineers.

Dan Fylstra is the founder and President of Frontline Systems Inc. (solver.com), an analytics software firm known for having developed the Solver in Microsoft Excel. Before Frontline Systems, Dan co-founded several software companies and a biotech venture, starting in 1978 with Personal Software, aka VisiCorp – the company that brought to market the very first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, for the Apple II. Dan has a B.S. in E.E. and Computer Science from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Rob Collie is C.E.O. and Founder of P3 (Power Pivot Pro) (powerpivotpro.com), a national consulting firm 100% dedicated to Power B.I. and the "Agile B.I." methodology. A former engineering leader at Microsoft, Rob led the BI-focused team within Microsoft Excel and later shaped Power Pivot v1 – the groundbreaking forerunner to Power B.I.
He is a sought-after speaker with a distinctive, down-to-earth style, and author of the world's #1-selling Power B.I. book.

David Monroy is a Senior Program Manager on the Excel team at Microsoft. He loves Excel because it offers endless possibilities for end-users to create, analyze, and share quantitative models or applications. David has worked on several Excel features, including Excel data types from Power B.I., workbook links for web, formula errors, and file performance and reliability, among others. David's experience with Excel started as an end-user. Before joining the Excel team, he built complex spreadsheets as a supply chain planner on the Microsoft Surface team, and as a management consultant before that.

Looking forward to meeting you!
Celia Alves and the MS Excel Team