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•   Please introduce your self. You may be as thorough as you wish. Feel free to include or omit any detail about yourself.
  
  I have a Master's Degree in Psychology (minor in Quantitative Research Methods) and a Master's Degree in Artificial Intelligence/Computer Science. Both from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
  
  My training in the latter involved topics like Lisp (my favorite programming language), predicate logic, non-deterministic programming, building artificial intelligence systems, information systems, relational databases, and the like.
  
  I did some research work in psychology and artificial intelligence before moving to my current job. I teach information systems, information systems audit, spreadsheets, and relational databases at the School of Accountancy in a 'college'.
  
  
  
•   When do you remember using Excel for the very first time? Can you remember any specific details from that first time?
  
  It must have been a day or two before I had to give a freshman class in Excel in probably 1997. I worked thru a rather simple syllabus that was in use back then.
  
  
  
•   When do you remember writing your first formula or VBA code for Excel?
  
  It must have been a + or Sum formula, I guess, for the very first freshman class I had to give.
  
  
  
•   On average, how many hours per day do you spend working with Excel formulas and/or VBA code?
  
  Two hours, maybe. With formulas, that is.
  
  
  
•   Which do you find most rewarding to work with: Formulas or VBA in Excel? Please tell us why?
  
  Formulas. Spreadsheets are basically connected sets of formulas (and VBA is not Lisp or Scheme). So I think that's the reason.
  
  
  
•   If you were going to give a novice, just starting out with Excel, some advice, what would it be?
  
  Try to master the basics and Excelese as fast as possible.
  Experimenting a lot and studying solutions to well-defined, intelligible problems become necessary to build expertise, more so if one is not trained in formal sciences.
  
  
  
•   Please provide a sample of your first work (either as a formula or vba code) in Excel and tell us about it.
  
  Hard to dig up one that can be considered as such. I suppose it must have been a (set of) formula(s) to a challenging question/problem at MrExcel, a Q&A board I ran into I believe while wandering once on the Internet.
  
  
  
•   What is your mental attitude when you are preparing to write formulae or VBA code? And what is your working environment?
  
  There must be a question/problem first. A solution mostly pops up by routine, not necessarily an Excel routine though.
  Harder things appear to make me run Excel in my head before I start composing possible formulas in Excel on the computer.
  
  My working environment is often my study at home or sometimes my office at school.
  
  
  
•   If there special preparations that must be in place before you can begin, what are they?
  
  None. Although Mozart fits my study quite well.
  
  
  
•   Finally, please give us something to think about - a reminder of your words here; a phrase that has helped you; a link to your own website. Anything that you think is important for the readers to remember.
  
  Cognition matters. More so, if you are a developer of spreadsheet systems or you want to become one. That is, there are good reasons for, e.g., why to avoid formulas with more than 4 Ifs or mega-formulas given the way the human cognition is.
  
  Links? Why not...
  
  Here is one to my "white paper on" Condition-driven computing that gives an extended description of the SumProduct worksheet function, dated as December 09, 2001 10:34 AM:
  
  http://www.mrexcel.com/wwwboard/messages/8961.html
  
  Another, a proposal to Microsoft regarding lookup functions or the #N/A problem:
  
  http://www.mrexcel.com/board2/viewtopic.php?p=46003
  
  
  

Thank you very much for answering the questions. This Black belt is yours...