Microsoft Excel expert Frédéric Le Guen will wear the French and Maltese flags on his sleeve at the Microsoft Global Summit in Seattle later on this month.
Excel is like a game to me. It is pure logic.
Mr Le Guen, a Parisian, is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional, one of a few hundred people honoured by the software giant for their expertise in specific software. Microsoft describes the MVPs as technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world knowledge in offline and online technical communities with exemplary commitment.
As there is, as yet, no MVP to represent Malta at the global event, Mr Le Guen, who is planning to move to the island to establish his own Office and Excel consultancy business in the next few weeks, offered to wear two flag badges on his shirt and promote the island.
Mr Le Guen, who graduated in economics from a Brittany university, is one of 89 MVP Excels in the world. Microsoft has just renewed his title for a second year after he wrote more than 100 new articles about Excel on his website.
He is the creator of excel-exercises.com, a website dedicated to help Excel users – whatever their profession – make the most of the software through knowledge sharing and exercises.
The project, he told The Times Business, was born in 2000 to fill a void. There were several books available giving detailed explanations on various features of Excel at the time, but none, he said, provided exercises to help users apply it the way they needed to.
Available in English and French, the website has thousands of users with an average new user joining the platform every minute. Mostly managers or accountants, users are often looking for fairly simple exercises.
Tired of the Parisian weather and big city life, Mr Le Guen, who spent some of his childhood in the south of France, is now preparing to move to Malta from where he will operate his website and set up a freelance consultancy.
He was awarded his first MVP title last year after he was “recognised” at a Microsoft TechDays conference in Paris. His name tag indicated he was the creator of excel-exercises.com and people walked up to him to introduce themselves as users.
An MVP Leader was impressed with the attention his website had attracted and asked him to submit a presentation to Microsoft about the portal and his writing.
At the conference, a publishing house also approached him to write a book for Excel users. Available in French only, the title sold 2,000 copies by last year and Mr Le Guen is hoping to commission a translation into English.
“The problem with Excel is that it was designed by engineers who do not know exactly what the end user needs,” Mr Le Guen explained. “I like to think of myself as a bridge between the creators and the end users to explain what can be done with it. My studies in economics help me to understand the problems the end users face.
“That is what is so exciting about being an MVP Excel. The MVP programme is not a competition. It is a way for people who are passionate about Excel to share knowledge among themselves and with Microsoft, fix any bugs, and filter new things through to end users.”
Mr Le Guen, who is involved in projects for banking, telecommunications and the motor industries and is a former external lecturer at Essec Business School, said most firms used Excel to process and examine information but often stuck to basic worksheets.
“Excel is like a game to me,” Mr Le Guen said. “It involves purely logical processes. A machine is able to make better calculations than I can, and faster. I don’t see why I should not try to learn how I can use Excel better to save time. Why should people create links, and copy and paste? All people need to do is create one function and copy and paste to the grid.
“Every time I visit an organisation to help with Excel, I beg the users to stop repeating the same actions each week, each month. Excel allows for the creation of automatic functions to do that, but people don’t seem to know.”
Mr Le Guen has several plans for his second year as MVP Excel. Among them are a series of articles detailing how to correctly import data into Excel, particularly ways to overcome a problem in the language concerning the decimal comma which was not always recognised as a decimal point.