Rickard
Born in 1951 in Malmö, in the
south of Sweden. Engineer in Technical Science at Lund Institute of
Technology 1973. Married to Eva who works as midwife in Arlöv. We
together have two children Daniel and Maria both grown up today.
Daniel lives in Coogee NSW Australia, while Maria is still studying in
Uppsala Sweden.
Employed by IBM 1976-1985 at their
sales offices in Gothenburg and Malmö with different roles as
technical specialist, SW-sales and HW-sales in S/370. During that
period I got useful competence in areas like MVS and CMS, which were
the main operating systems at that time. The first time I worked with
a popular but strange programming language APL.
In 1978 and the years after IBM announced some APL-based end user
products aimed to be used by non IT-professionals (APL/DI, ADRS and
IC/1), which were IBM’s first steps towards what was called end user
computing. In that period the first SQL-based systems were released
for use in mainframe systems, i.e. SQLDS and DB2. These were the first
preparations to what should end up with the PC-revolution. I finished
my career in IBM being a HW-salesman to some of the key accounts in
the south of Sweden.
1985 I started my own company RICOL
IC-Konsult AB with consultancy service for mainframe customers who
wished to offer their customers the service of digging out information
from the databases without being a programmer. In this period the
tools where named AS from IBM and FOCUS
from
a New York based company Information
Builders. My customers at
that time were companies like: IKEA, Sydkraft,
IBM,
Volvo,
Perstorp
AB ...
When the first release of Vissual Basic was announced I was one of the first in Sweden to buy this product. VB has since then developed a lot and when Microsoft bought FoxPro and released the first version for Windows I worked with this tool for a while. When Access 2.0 came I soon became an Access-freak which also has been the environment my customer have preferred for their applications. (What a coincidence..) I April 1996 I was certified as an MCP in Access and in the autumn 2000 after a week of holiday in Morocco I tried to run the test for both VB6 and SQL-Server in the same day. The vacation had probably been too interesting with few lazy hours at the beach so I managed VB with a margin of 1p and failed SQL-server with the same margin. Lately I have been lazy picking up formal certificates, basically because I found the market value rather low when fully occupied in customer projects and the knowledge the tests asks for is not always what you need when working in practice.
Today I work with MS Office as my
platform for developing applications. Behind the curtain I use VBA to
develop some kind of Add-in that will make my customer’s favourite
in Office to be more useful when it comes to solving a specific task.
Most of the time my projects involve a database independent if the
basic tool is Excel, Word or PowerPoint. Most of the time a
JET-database is feasible sometimes I will need SQL-Server. Most of the
time the data comes from an ERP-system where it is stored in a totally
different way. Starting with Office 97 and strengthened in Office 2000
it is possible with simple means to build sophisticated technical
solutions with great UI’s, which gives the user the impression of
simplicity. And the best of all this is that the functions are offered
in an environment that the user already knows which means fast
learning and adoption in the organization. In this way the user builds
up the self-confidence needed in a very short time when if
to comes to using the tool in their all day work.
Books I have read, reread and using
in my work:
'Writing Excel Macros' ISBN:0-596-00359-5
'Microsoft Access Developer's Guide to SQL Server' ISBN:0-672-31944-6
Magazines I read and sometimes try
to get published in:
Smart Access
Access VB SQL Advisor
Privately I am a middle-aged man living with my wife in Bjärred. We often spend vacations and weekends in our cottage in Blekinge in the archipelago of Karlskrona. When among my friends I often play boule or bridge and taste some of the good wines mostly from the ‘new world’.