Greetings from a Nubie

Greetings to All!

I don't know why I never joined this forum before. I figure the best way to get help in a forum like this is to actually invest a part of yourself in it. Here goes.

I'm 67 year young former Florida boy, now long an Alabama resident. I've had a variety of jobs, but ever since I started learning spreadsheets, I've been using them for all kinds of things at work and home. I first learned on Lotus 123 and got away from it as fast as I could. After teaching myself & using Excel for a few years, I felt like I could almost make it sing & dance. But alas, I never learned Visual Basic.

I worked for a major copier/facilities management company (my career #4) as the product they sold (i.e. outsourcing). That's when I got so deep in Excel, accounting for hundreds of thousands of copies on hundreds of machines every month. I'm a lousy typist and I know how much trouble it can cause when you have to enter the same data multiple times. I got pretty good at using (multi-nested) formulas to make comparisons, verify at a glance with conditional formatting, enter a piece of data once & have it populate wherever else it belonged, and extensive sorting so I could copy & paste submitted data. Maybe for the experts in this forum 100+ sheet workbooks aren't that big a thing, but I thought I had done something then. My employer's tier 3 Excel support person & I talked often & she even called me a couple of times to see how I had done something so she could help someone else in the company with the same problem. Then (corporate irony) the outsource department I was a part of outsourced what I did and I was on my own again. (They sent my job to a foreign country-Chicago.)

Now I use Excel mainly for my own small business (career 2 and 5) for invoicing, keeping up with billing, taxes, and so on. I turn to excel for budgeting almost any project. My latest Excel project (a bit primitive I admit) was to build a decision tool for a couple of purchases. I'm a part of a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and during my first search experience I saw how inadequate my CERT-issued backpack was. If you've ever looked at tactical backpacks on Amazon you know why I ran to Excel for help. There are literally 1000's of them in the < $50 range. My new pack is now waiting until I have time to fill it.

My job history includes music ministry, teaching math, various roles in the copier company, and installing drapery, blinds, pictures, art, mirrors, & almost anything on the wall or assembled out of a box. Non-job interests include home repair, yard work, minor automotive repair, construction-type mission projects, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams, & grandkids.

Just a note to the under 30 crowd who are probably thinking, "what kind of old man is this?" Someday never comes. You will always be you. If you think things will be different when....well, forget about that. Some parts of me don't work like they used to but I still feel like that same guy I was somewhere around age 18-20. Almost everyone does but you don't realize it until you're about 60. By default, you are in the process of becoming forever the person you are right now. If you don't like that thought then change. It won't be easy, but you will be better for it. Live on purpose rather than look back & wish you had.