Our team
byyours is written and edited by a small group of working spreadsheet professionals. Between us, we’ve spent more than 30 years inside the tools we write about — closing the books, building models, refactoring legacy workbooks, and rescuing files at 2 AM. Every article on this site has been written by a person whose name appears below.
Daniel Cole — Lead Editor
Daniel has spent 14 years building financial models for mid-cap consulting clients across manufacturing, SaaS, and consumer goods. He started as a junior analyst at a boutique transaction-advisory firm, moved to model audit and validation, and now leads the byyours editorial desk full-time.
Areas of specialization: formula architecture, dynamic arrays, performance optimization on large workbooks, Power Pivot and the Data Model, and the dark corners of error propagation across linked workbooks. Daniel maintains the bulk of byyours’s Formula Errors and Performance categories.
Background: B.A. in Economics. Twelve years working with Microsoft 365 / Excel and the Power Platform. Microsoft Excel Expert credential. He has personally rebuilt more than 200 broken financial models from raw inputs and can usually tell, within 60 seconds of opening a workbook, where the architectural mistake was made.
What he tells junior analysts most often: “Convert the range to a table before you write the lookup. Almost every error in this article would have been impossible if the source had been a table.”
Sophia Reyes — Senior Contributor
Sophia spent ten years inside healthcare analytics — first at a regional health plan, then at a national claims-analytics vendor — building the BI infrastructure that connected raw operational data to executive dashboards. She is byyours’s resident expert on Power Query, M, the Excel-to-Power-BI migration path, and any guide that involves connecting Excel or Sheets to an external data source.
Areas of specialization: Power Query and M, Power Pivot and DAX, dataflows, refresh and connection management, Excel-to-Power-BI migration, dashboard architecture, and the bridge between Excel and the broader Microsoft data stack. Sophia leads byyours’s Visualization category and contributes heavily to Performance and Data Cleanup.
Background: B.S. in Statistics. Ten years working with the Microsoft data stack. Microsoft Certified: Data Analyst Associate. She has migrated four enterprise BI environments off of Excel-driven reporting onto Power BI, and has strong opinions about when not to migrate.
What she tells teams considering Power BI: “Migrate the reports that are slow, shared, and refresh from external sources. Keep the ad-hoc analytical workbooks in Excel. The question is never Excel vs. Power BI — it’s which tool fits each report.”
Marcus Chen — Senior Contributor
Marcus came up through the audit side of a Big Four accounting firm and spent the next decade inside quarterly and year-end close cycles at three different listed companies. His relationship with Excel is, in his words, “intimate, occasionally hostile, and never not under deadline.” He runs byyours’s File Recovery and Collaboration categories and is the editor we call when an article has the words “corrupted” or “version restore” in the title.
Areas of specialization: file corruption recovery, version control, OneDrive and SharePoint co-authoring, audit-trail workflows, password recovery (legitimate, not bypass), and the operational realities of shared workbooks during close. Marcus has personally recovered more than 50 corrupted XLSX files from raw XML during quarter-end fire drills.
Background: B.B.A. Accounting. CPA (state of New York). Ten years working with Excel inside SOX-controlled accounting environments. He has tested every file-recovery procedure on this site against an intentionally-corrupted workbook before publishing.
What he tells controllers: “The fastest disaster recovery is a backup that exists. Spend five minutes setting up version history. Save yourself five hours later.”
How we work
The three of us run a weekly editorial meeting where we review reader requests, plan upcoming articles, and re-test the most-trafficked guides against the current Excel and Sheets releases. We rotate the “first reader” role — whoever drafted an article hands it to one of the other two for a fresh-eyes review before it goes to copy.
We’re a small team by design. We’d rather publish 50 articles a year that we’d stake our reputations on than 500 articles we’d quietly disown.
Want to write for byyours?
We don’t accept guest posts. We do hire — if you’re a working spreadsheet professional with five or more years inside Excel or Sheets, and a particular specialty that complements our current coverage (e.g., scientific computing in Excel, VBA application development, Google Apps Script), drop us a line via the contact form with a CV and one writing sample.
Editorial contact
For questions about the byyours team, our credentials, or our editorial process, contact contact@byyours.com.