A compiler engineer who spent his career inside Excel instead of a terminal.

Daniel's relationship with spreadsheets as engineering tools started before he ever wrote a line of code. From 1980 to 1988, as a Project Manager at Pyramid Control in Midland, MI, he estimated electrical and controls projects for the chemical, pharmaceutical, and petroleum industries — and built his first estimating workbook in Lotus 123, tracking job costs, schedules, and manpower plans for projects ranging from $10,000 to $2 million. That instinct — that a well-built workbook could replace an entire manual process — never left him.

His path into software started where most careers in it do — on UNIX. As a Student Systems Programmer/Analyst at Michigan State University from 1988 to 1992, he administered a Convex 220 running UNIX 4.2 BSD and wrote a batch-queue balancing application that gave professors submitting heavy computational jobs their fair share of processing power — without letting anyone monopolize the queue and lock out the rest of the research community. A summer as a System Analyst Intern at Dow Chemical followed, where he built DCL and ISQL utilities to monitor system performance and, given direct access to Dow's VAX systems, developed an automated tool to generate VAX Device Control Libraries — standardizing how new printers were added across a fleet of thousands of different printer models.

He graduated from Michigan State University's College of Engineering with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, specialized in compiler design, with a minor in General Engineering spanning both mechanical and electrical coursework. That combination — how languages get parsed and translated, paired with a practical engineering grounding — became the throughline of everything he built afterward.

Finding VBA before most people knew it existed

In 1993, as an Application Developer at Arthur Andersen, Daniel was staffed on the firm's Corporate Tax Solution (AACTS) — a client-server suite built mostly in compiled C, paired with proprietary tooling he worked on that generated the graphical tax forms themselves and mapped every calculated entry to the correct field on each form. It was there he also ran a formal comparison study between the same Lotus 123 he'd been building workbooks in since 1980, Visual Basic, and an early beta of Excel VBA v5 — to determine the best platform for the firm's next planning applications. VBA won, and Daniel put the decision straight to work, migrating the firm's State Planning Manager application from Lotus 123 to Excel. He's been building on that decision ever since.

The pattern repeated at the American Bar Association, where he designed and shipped a multi-form Excel VBA billing application — reading mainframe output and generating six different statement layouts with embedded graphics and barcodes — in two weeks flat, to hit a $3M billing cycle deadline. He also supported the association's Gupta-based systems, which managed memberships, subscriptions, and billing across the organization.

Bringing UNIX tools into Office

At Keane, Inc. (1995–2001), Daniel worked as an analyst and later Principal Consultant on Meijer's MIDS (Meijer Integrated Distribution System) — a five-year distribution platform built from scratch in PowerBuilder, Sybase SQL, and C++, spanning Windows, Novell, AS/400, and IBM Mainframe environments. He took over version control for the platform, engineering his own scripts paired with MS Office — mostly Excel — to manage it in the absence of dedicated tooling. He also wrote an AWK program that generated a full CRUD matrix directly from Sybase stored procedures — replacing a 300-man-hour manual audit and lifting accuracy from 70% to 100% — and built a C and KornShell audit process that compared stored procedures across development, test, and production nightly. For a Kalamazoo pharmaceutical client, he reverse-engineered three Visual Basic financial applications totaling more than 71,000 lines of code after their OLAP database vendor dropped support for the version they depended on — converting every API call to the interface required by the current release without interrupting the client's 24/7 worldwide operations, and writing a parser that generated a full indexed Word manual directly from the source code, since none existed.

This is the origin of what he now describes as VBA versions of classic UNIX text-processing tools: parsing and code-generation engines — in the spirit of LEX and YACC — written natively in VBA to read source code or documents and produce structured output, entirely inside the MS Office Suite his clients already had installed.

Twenty years in construction and material handling

From 2001 onward, Daniel moved deeper into project delivery — first at Siemens in Dallas/Irving, TX, where he ran estimating, installation operations, and logistics for large-scale parcel and airport baggage systems, including the $95M UPS Worldport conveyor expansion that won 1st place in the 2010 Siemens Mobility Project Excellence Awards and 2nd place in the 2011 IPMA Project Excellence Awards. At Dematic, he authored a Lean initiative that used Visio flow diagrams to auto-generate application configuration files, routing tables, and test scripts — saving 5–8% of project cost. At viastore Systems and later Designed Conveyor Systems, he managed automated storage-and-retrieval and parcel-sortation projects up to $100M, building warehouse management and FlexSim logistics models along the way — all backed by tools he engineered himself in MS Office.

Logic Wise Solutions

In September 2023, Daniel founded Logic Wise Solutions, LLC to formalize three decades of that work into a dedicated consultancy — and to begin packaging his 70,000+ line personal VBA library for licensing to other teams. The mission is simple: most companies already own the software that could solve their biggest workflow problems. They just need someone who can make Excel, Access, Word, Project, and Visio behave like the enterprise systems they were never quite sold as.