Yesterday was Elle MacPhereson’s birthday. Oh, yeah, it was Daily Dose of Excel’s birthday too. Can you believe it’s been five years? Feels like 20.

Checking the archives, I see that my first post was SUMIF Between Two Dates. I guess that was a pretty good one to start with, since it’s in the top 5 popular posts and has 197 comments.

You know, they laughed at me when I named this blog Daily Dose of Excel. And they were right. I liked the way it sounded, but I didn’t really think about the pressure I was putting on myself. OK, I don’t really feel any pressure, I just post when I can. When I started, I would post three times a day – morning, noon, and night. That seemed like a reasonable schedule. :) Now I shoot for three times a week. In 2009, I’m trying to have a post for every weekday in the month, and thanks to the Euler posts, I’m pretty close to that.

I get advice from family and friends all of the time to change the focus of the blog. “It’s too advanced”, they say. “I read your blog. I didn’t get it, but I read it”, they say. I keep saying I’m going to add a couple of less advanced posts a week to see how it goes, but it hasn’t happened yet. In the last month, I haven’t had time to post about the stuff that interests me, much less a post on the IF function. Oh well, I’ll keep dreaming.

I’ve learned a couple of things over the last five years, and here are two of them: Don’t make ironic, sarcastic, or misleading post titles. For example, don’t title a post about your blog’s birthday “Elle’s Birthday”. That’s just stupid. Maybe for these non-Excel, throw way posts it’s OK. But for the Excel stuff, I should make the title meaningful. In the beginning, my titles were “clever”. That’s about as hard to maintain as a daily posting schedule. And it makes it really hard to find stuff later.

Another lesson I learned is to include pictures of hot chicks in my posts whenever possible. Everyone likes hot chicks; dudes, other hot chicks. But of course I keep it tasteful. Finding an appropriate photo of Elle is not as easy as you might think, as a Google Image Search will quickly tell you.

Bonus Lesson: Check your spelling. I wrote a post entitled Doppleganger. That misspelling will be with me forever. It doesn’t even rank high on Google for the misspelled word, which is the only advantage of misspelling a word.

In addition to the first post, here are some other highlights of the past five years:

• November 2004, Move from Typepad to WordPress
• November 2004, Added authors
• First Birthday, You guys talk me out of a name change
• September, 2005 Changed domain from dicks-blog.com
• February 2006, My favorite post even though it caused some problems, I still think it’s the best post to date.
• April, 2007 April Fools jokes
• March, 2008 Australian Excel Conference