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Charley Kyd

While working as a cost accountant at Hewlett Packard in the late 1970s, I beta tested VisiCalc. So I've been using spreadsheets for quite a while.

As the CFO of several manufacturing companies in the 1980s, I used nearly ten different brands of spreadsheets, including a 3-D spreadsheet created by the Boeing Corporation, the airplane company. But after I was introduced to the beta version of the first release of Excel for the PC, I've never looked back.

While using VisiCalc, I invented the idea of dashboard reporting with spreadsheets. The report designs were inspired by two articles printed in the Harvard Business Review about 1980. In 1984, I devoted a chapter about reporting with "mini graphs" in my first book, Financial Modeling Using Lotus 1-2-3. In 1990, during the beta of Excel 3, I created Excel dashboard reports similar to those you see today. By 1992, Techtronics, Inc., was using my dashboard reports to promote their color printers.

In addition to the book about 1-2-3, I've written two similar books about Excel, and one book about programming Excel. I've published nearly 50 articles and columns in national magazines, including Inc, Management Accounting, Lotus, Byte, Business Software, and Business Performance Management.

I've consulted for both large and small companies in industries as diverse as high-tech manufacturing, public utilities, telecommunications, a chain of hardware stores, and a fat rendering company.

But these days, I seldom have time for consulting.

Charley Kyd
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Ocean Shores, Washington