Hi, I’m Paul “Terp” Terpeluk and I want to make you faster at Excel. If you spend a lot of time in Excel and always feel pressed for time, I believe I can help.
So how did I end up launching this web site?
In 1997, during the first week of my MBA program, I met Excel and fell in love. For the next 15 years I used Excel quite a bit as a Finance professional (and also in a busy retail environment). But it in 2012 I took a new FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) job that had me in Excel 180% of the time and working obscene hours for two years straight. Excel and I were effectively married, with McDonalds joining the party late at night.
The only way to survive and succeed was to change how I used Excel. Thus, I went through an intensive self-training program to learn everything I could to become more efficient — without abandoning my mouse or learning VBA. Books and courses could only do so much. I learned the most valuable tricks through experience, my co-workers and trial and error.
After achieving victory by Turbo Boosting my efficiency and reclaiming my personal life, I decided in the summer of 2015 to leave my corporate job and start this web site. It was something I had in the back of my mind for years — finding a way to share that joy of discovery we get from learning faster ways of doing things in Excel.
FasterAtExcel.com is devoted to sharing and expanding the set of habits I developed and documented during my years as a corporate Excel user. I aim to make you faster without abandoning your mouse or learning VBA. If I succeed, you will avoid years of pain and suffering and may even be known as an Excel efficiency freak, surrounded by a sea of mere mortals.
We never stop learning new tricks in Excel. I hope you learn something valuable here, and if you do, please share your own tricks as well. Excel is the world’s most popular business software (hundreds of millions of users), and together we really can make the world more efficient.
Paul
P.S. As for my personal life, I live outside of Sacramento, CA with my wife, son and daughter (who are in junior high and elementary school). My passion is fly-fishing for trout and steelhead in the rivers of Northern California (or wherever else I can go). I was born and raised in Doylestown, PA (just outside of Philadelphia), and subsequently lived in New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ukraine, Michigan, Alaska and Texas before moving to California in 2002 to “try” it (we’ve been “trying” it for quite a few years now!). I have a BA in Philosophy from Princeton, and MA in Philosophy from Brown and an MBA in Finance from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Please email me with any thoughts.