I’m Presenting on Excel at a Conference in the UK. I Know, I Don’t Get It Either.

I will be presenting at a conference in the UK. European Spreadsheet Productivity and Risk Interest Group — EuSPRIG –

I first touched Excel at 27. That was over 30 years ago.

I was working at a semiconductor factory. I needed to visualize product data. Someone handed me an Excel package and said, “Nobody’s using this yet, but maybe it’ll come in handy.” So I slotted a floppy disk into a tiny black-and-white Mac screen and got started.

My computing background started before MS-DOS, on a pocket calculator that you programmed. So my baseline assumption was: computers are things you program. The Mac didn’t offer an obvious entry point for that. I was wondering what to do when Excel showed up. My first instinct was to treat it as an interpreted language — something you automate with macros, not a spreadsheet.

Day one: I recorded a macro and wrote a simple one myself.

Day two: I piped factory data through a serial connection I’d rigged up myself, fed it into Excel, and something happened. I don’t know how else to put it. Something just worked. It was interesting. That’s it. That was enough.

Then I discovered the SUM function. It added things up. Without a loop. Without writing any code. I was genuinely surprised.

Around age 22, I’d tried building something like a game database in Lotus 1–2–3. Never finished it. Looking back, I think it’s because I wasn’t using calculation at all. SUM was a completely different experience.

After SUM came DSUM and DCOUNTA — database functions — because I needed to sort and aggregate data. So my learning path went: SUM, then immediately into database functions. That might sound like skipping steps, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. I needed it, so I learned it. That experience became a deep conviction later: things labeled “advanced” might not actually require advanced prerequisites. Sequence matters more than level.

For the record, I worked at that factory the whole time without ever learning VLOOKUP.

Windows 98 arrived. The IT boom hit Japan. Excel became the face of “IT” in this country — the thing everyone was suddenly supposed to know. And in my workplace, I was the only one who actually knew how to use it.

So I started teaching.

I assumed I’d have to work hard to learn everything else — Word, PowerPoint, the rest. But the principles I’d built around Excel transferred almost immediately. Same OS, similar bones. Once you understand how one application thinks, the others make sense faster.

At the time, computer instructors in Japan largely came from a word-processing tradition. The culture was about typing speed and accuracy in Japanese input — a skill that doesn’t translate directly for English speakers, but it was a big deal here. The people with early advantage were certified through a Microsoft Japan program called MOT, which systematized how to teach: curriculum design, learner motivation, instructional method.

That structure wasn’t inherently bad. But it hardwired a template into Excel education that still runs today: screen orientation, then input, then formulas, then formatting, then functions, then database features. Nobody seems to know who decided this order. Nobody seems to have changed it either.

I came from outside that template. And at first, I resisted it.

The operating assumption in the industry was that passing the certification exam was the goal — for learners and instructors alike. Students who didn’t see it that way were to be persuaded until they did. I thought that was wrong.

So I decided to push back.

Then, gradually, I became one of them.

To help students pass, I had them memorize. To make memorization easier, I built systems for it. Repetition-based learning. Follow-the-example learning. The methods I now criticize — I helped build them.

I’m not sure how to sit with this. In 2026, when I look at what’s wrong with Excel education in Japan, there’s a real possibility that I’m one of the people who created it. Maybe not one of them. Maybe just me.

But something shifted.

A student graduated. She’d completed everything I had to offer and moved beyond me. I’ve never forgotten that feeling. Then she referred a friend. “He explains things clearly and you improve fast,” she apparently said.

After that, I stopped spending money on advertising.

The lesson felt obvious in retrospect: make people dependent on you and they stay until they don’t. Help them outgrow you and they send you their friends. But the industry wasn’t designed around that logic.

That’s why what I saw in Japan’s Excel education market felt so off.

Video courses, PDF downloads — the business model is simple: spend on production once, recover costs over time, then reinvest. That’s normal. But this market seemed to stop at “collect money from whoever’s in front of you.” The content was mostly things you could find by searching. Students left satisfied that they’d been taught something. Whether they’d actually learned anything was a different question. I came to strongly resent that asymmetry.

I believed my approach was genuinely better for learners. But nobody was paying attention. In a saturated market like Excel instruction, the more honest your signal, the more it gets buried in noise.

I thought about it. Social media strategy? Udemy courses? All of it felt like more noise. To cut through, I’d need to become an authority. But if someone like me — with no institutional backing — tried to perform authority, I’d poison everything I’d built.

So I thought: become a legitimate one instead.

Could academia recognize what I was actually doing?

In Japan, nearly impossible. Journal submission required university affiliation or the right introduction. Some outlets charged hundreds of thousands of yen just to process a submission.

So I looked outside Japan.

I found entire research communities dedicated to Excel itself — fields that don’t exist in Japan. And I found something that shifted my understanding of what Excel even was.

Audit. Financial audit.

This world has no tolerance for ambiguity. It’s about reading the human intent embedded in a spreadsheet’s formulas — tracing not just whether the numbers are right, but whether the thinking behind them is sound. Metacognition at its highest level. I hadn’t imagined Excel could reach there.

And at the center of that world, I found EuSpRIG — the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group.

I submitted two papers.

Both were accepted.

I still don’t really understand what that means.

People around me say it’s a big deal. An important event. But I have no way to measure it. Is it Shohei Ohtani-level? I genuinely don’t know. The scale doesn’t map onto anything I can feel.

What I can say is this:

If you do it properly, you can get further than you’d expect.

If you do it properly.

EuSpRIG Annual Conference

EuSpRIG 26th Conference

Thursday, July 9 & Friday July 10, 2026, in the University of Greenwich, London, UK

https://eusprig.org/conferences/eusprig-annual-conference/