INTHEBLACK May 2022 - Magazine - Page 42
MEMBER PROFILE
// C A R E E R PAT H
STORY GLENN CULLEN
PHOTOGRAPHY PHILIP GOSTELOW
A FORMULA
FOR SUCCESS
It has been two decades since Neale Blackwood CPA’s first Excel article appeared in
INTHEBLACK. Today, his live webinars are attended by people across the globe, and he’s planning
to write another book on this popular computer program. What makes this CPA excel at Excel?
N
eale Blackwood CPA happily calls
himself a one-trick pony. However,
given that trick involves explaining a
program used by more than one billion people
around the world, you can perhaps see why
he never bothered trying to morph into an
Olympic dressage horse.
Put simply, the 59-year-old trained
accountant excels at Excel; so much so, this
month he celebrates 20 years of writing about
Microsoft’s venerated spreadsheet program for
INTHEBLACK.
“As an accountant, I’m nothing special, but
with Excel, I’ve learnt a lot over the years and I
have a fairly good memory,” he says modestly.
“It’s a kind of ‘use it or lose it’ program, but I
tend to remember most things. It’s a bit
embarrassing from time to time when I Google
something and it is my own article or blog post
that I find that’s explaining it!”
Completing a bachelor’s degree in
accounting in 1983 at what is now Edith Cowan
University, Blackwood went on to work at the
University of Western Australia. He was an early
adopter of Excel on the Apple Mac in the late
1980s. He used spreadsheets in roles at a gold
mining company, real estate agency and
manufacturer before settling at building
products company Midland Brick. There he says
plenty of free rein with his work enabled him to
become something of a specialist in the
program that rapidly started gaining
professional traction in the 1990s.
“Things were really picking up and people
started having a PC on their desk,” Blackwood
recalls. “I knew a lot about Excel, so I started
sharing tips and tricks in the company and had
42 ITB May 2022
my own Excel newsletter. Then I started training
people in the company.”
Blackwood had his first Excel tips and tricks
story published for INTHEBLACK in May 2002.
In October that year he turned it into a regular
column that has featured in every issue since.
At first, he answered direct questions from
CPAs. Now, his remit is tackling a set topic
each edition.
Blackwood says a lightbulb moment
presented itself in June 2009.
“I had a training course in public speaking
and they were videoing me,” he recalls. “This
was back in the day when that was a big deal.
The first half of the presentation was
Powerpoint and the second half was Excel.
When I watched the presentation back again
later, I quickly picked up on the fact that when
I was using PowerPoint I was boring. Yet as
soon as I got into Excel, I was lit up and
animated. I thought at that point, I’m not
touching PowerPoint again.” His own training
since has been a PowerPoint-free zone.
By 2010, Blackwood had built up his
expertise, contacts and business to the point
where he could completely go it alone and
concentrate on being an Excel expert. Since
2012, he’s conducted more than 350 live
webinars for thousands of people around the
world, and in 2014 wrote the book Advanced
Excel Reporting for Management Accountants.
An update of that book, as well as another
Excel publication are possibilities in the
coming years.
With much of his business concentrated
online and him working largely from home,
Blackwood’s work routine didn’t change much
when COVID-19 restrictions hit, but his business
was affected. He decided to make his Excel
knowledge more accessible to everyone, and
ran all of his webinars for free during lockdown,
so that people could improve their skills in the
program while at home. Up to 390 people
joined his sessions at any one time.
“I thought it was a way to give back,” he
says. “People had lost their jobs or had some
extra time on their hands, so I think they
appreciated it.”
While there have been alternate spreadsheet
programs over the years and the likes of the
free Google Sheets application has recently
staked a claim, Blackwood doesn’t see Excel
losing its crown any time soon.
“If you took Excel out of all the businesses,
they would crash,” he says. “There has been
talk that it might die with something like
[Google] Sheets, but it just hasn’t happened.
In the last 10 years, it has really improved its
data analysis. It really is a lot easier than it was
in the old days.”
An innate desire of people to “see things in
rows and columns” has no doubt helped ensure
Excel’s endearing popularity, but Blackwood
says the real strength of the program lies in its
adaptability across a range of professions from
accounting to engineering and statistics.
Of his own ability – what has enabled
Blackwood to forge a career across four decades
with one computer program at its core?
“I work with a lot of different companies, and
sometimes I think my superpower isn’t Excel,
but being able to switch between all kinds of
different data structures that organisations
are using.”