ETC Technology Portal

Loren Abdulezer, the CEO of Evolving Technologies Corporation was interviewed by Ken Rayment of the Better Process News. An audio recording of the interview can be found on the podcast link. For your convenience, we have enclosed a transcript along with some some illustrative visuals.

Transcript of Interview on May 19, 2007 at the Crystal Ball User Conference, Denver Colorado 

Click the sound icon (below) to listen to the recorded interview at PodCaster news. 

KR: Welcome to the Better Process podcast. Today for my next guest we have Loren Abdulezer and he is CEO over at Evolving Technologies Corporation. Loren, welcome to the Show.

ETC: Thank you Ken. It's a pleasure to be here.

KR: Loren, let's just give people a quick overview of your background and what brought you to where we are today?

ETC: Okay, first of all, I'm a long time user of Crystal Ball. I started using it in mid-1990s. So that was back when the company [Decisioneering] was only five or six people big, and I saw great promise for that type of tool and technology. I do a lot of work with companies in terms of data analysis; in terms of being able to take complex, hard to visualize data and putting it into forms where they can make clear cut decisons, see things pictorially, visually, and really get the big picture, but at the same time zero in on specific detail.

I do a lot of work with companies in terms of data analysis; in terms of being able to take complex, hard to visualize data and putting it into forms where they can make clear cut decisons, see things pictorially, visually, and really get the big picture, but at the same time zero in on specific detail.

ETC: You're quite right and that's actually where I spent a good deal of my career working on. I've written several books. One of them is called Excel Best Practices for Business and the other is called Escape from Excel Hell. Both are published by Wiley, so I guess you can find them on Amazon or whatever.

These are books that really just summarize a lot of the practices that I've learned over the years and developed in working with spreadsheets. Often I work with companies. they live and die by creating spreadsheets and they use it for everything. Sometimes they use it very well. Sometimes they invent new uses and they don't even realize they're doing it. And other times they work against themselves, because they don't design spreadsheets in ways that really could facilitate what they're tyring to achieve.

KR: In one of your books, it kind of caught my attention escaping from Excel hell, and the question is, I guess I'm going to kind of jump this one, how is 2007 doing in comparison to the previous models as far as the analysis tools and that sort of thing?


ETC: Well certainly, they've [Microsoft] taken it quite a few steps further. You start out now where you have instead of being able to have a worksheet with 65 thousand rows and 256 columns, you basically have something like a million rows and 16,384 columns. So now you really got a very very long rope that you can extend and you can conveniently hang yourself on it, if you want to. But the other side is they've improved in terms of the user interface, but fundamentally the same spreadsheet techniques apply on both the older version of Excel 2003 and Excel 2007. Well let's jump into some of those challenges and just kind of broadly talk about some of the issues that people do end up paying themselves with within the industry.

Okay. The one that I would really want to concentrate on more than anything else is the area of spreadsheet design. It's very easy to design a spreadsheet, copy and paste formulas, and they work lickity split, and they work very very well. Sometimes you get into a level of complexity or (level of) volume where it starts to get hard to manage. What people will do is put a formula in every single row and in the process of doing that it starts getting slower, harder to work with. Over time it grows. This year it works well, but next year, rather than three divisions you're analyzing, fourteen divisions or departments. So now it grows in complexity and you have to manage this beast. There's a simple technique called the Layering Approach that really facilitates everything by separating it out into modular chunks, and I'd like to explain how to do that.