Provide a quick, creative biography in 140 characters or less.
More bioHelen Feddema grew up in New York City. She was ready for computers when she was 12, but computers were not ready for her yet, so she got a B.S. in Philosophy from Columbia and an M.T.S. in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, while working at various office jobs. It was at HDS that she got her first computer, an Osborne, and soon computers were her primary interest. She started with word processing and spreadsheets, went on to learn dBASE, and did dBASE development for six years, part of this time as a corporate developer. After being laid off in a flurry of corporate downsizing, she started doing independent consulting and development, using dBASE, ObjectVision, WordPerfect and Paradox.
Always looking for something new and better, Helen beta tested Access 1.0, and soon recognized that this was the database she had been looking for ever since Windows 3.0 was introduced and she saw the gap waiting to be filled by a great Windows database. Since then she has worked as a developer of Microsoft Office applications, concentrating on Access, Word and (since 1996) Outlook.
Helen has written a number of books on Microsoft Office subjects (mostly Access).
She is the editor of Access Watch, a more or less biweekly ezine.
She lives in the mid-Hudson area of New York state, with two cats and three computers.