About Spreadsheet Alchemy
Greetings and welcome to my website!
My name is Steve Squier, and I am the founder/owner and principal consultant at Spreadsheet Alchemy. As sole employee, I will be your personal contact, strategic consultant, content instructor, and architect/designer of your ultimate solution.
Industry Experience
I contributed as a research systems engineer for an aerospace subsystems provider for 30 years. Through this work, I have employed the comprehensive features of spreadsheets (primarily Microsoft Excel) to create customized tools for automating many repetitive business processes. This also included coding of complex design methodologies using the VBA scripting language. The software tools I developed have been used by design engineers, project managers, marketing personnel, and program directors. Really, anyone seeking to obtain a quick first-order solution to an engineering question that ensures repeatability and traceability. But my experience is not just in a corporate engineering environment.
Academic Experience
In a similar manner, I transferred these systems-level spreadsheet skills to my subsequent full-time academic career (nearly 20 years) as a college instructor, department chair, academic unit director, and division dean. Within this environment, I created many custom applications designed to assist with the operational needs of several colleges. These tools spanned many diverse areas of the colleges I worked for. Particular subjects frequently surfaced, such as semester class scheduling, faculty load analysis, academic assessment data collection and reporting, student advising and guided pathways, enrollment management projection, and curriculum development.
Strengths
I have been fortunate to be a well-respected and established institution-wide (and in many cases industry-wide) expert in this area. As a result of my top-down systems perspective, I can not only see the forest for the trees but can also drill down and implement the operational details while maintaining an overall high-level program viewpoint. In my experience, this is something relatively rare in the engineering and higher education communities. In addition, my strong analytical capabilities and problem-solving/critical thinking approach benefit my clients. These skills provide the necessary qualifications essential for recognizing and applying opportunities for automating data analysis in any discipline area that deals with large volumes of institutional records.
In addition, I have applied my spreadsheet skills to the needs of nonprofit organizations to help reduce administrative costs and to make financial information more accessible to board members. This facilitates their ability to quickly identify key areas for revenue/expense discussions and decision-making.
Spreadsheet Alchemy was formed exclusively to address the variety of challenges that any organization (private, public, educational, government, nonprofit) might face when attempting to improve their workflow and standard processes. For a detailed overview of my qualifications and experience, please view my LinkedIn profile.