The DMW in DMW Consultancy

David M. Wallis is the director of DMW Consultancy Ltd. He devises and presents all the company's training courses and workshops.

His interest in PCs was grabbed by the arrival in the UK of the IBM PC and seminal business software—including the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet—at the start of the 1980s.

At that time he was researching and writing for Which? magazine: he wrote all the early articles in Which? about home computers, PCs, peripherals and software.

David went freelance in 1986, and incorporated DMW Consultancy Ltd in 1988.

Keeping up With Developments

In the early days of the PC, David created and presented Lotus 1-2-3 training courses mounted by the then new breed of company supplying PCs to meet the explosion in demand from businesses for this new technology.

He took an interest in Microsoft Windows from its very first version and invested heavily in learning Excel as soon as it appeared. This even lead to training Microsoft personnel in the use of Excel at their Winnersh centre.

David followed Word from DOS to Windows. In the early 1990s, on its arrival, he was an adopter of Microsoft Access as a business solutions development tool.

David believes that understanding the nuts and bolts of the software underpins his ability and value as a trainer.

Full understanding is essential support for his activity as a consultant and business systems developer.

Training Qualifications

David's work as a systems developer—in Access, Excel, Outlook and Word, and for the web—is the basis for the experience he brings to the courses he writes and presents.

Equally importantly, David believes, his journalistic and teaching experiences—he lectured on physics and maths for some years in a college of technology—equip him to present technicalities concisely, in ordinary language.

He considers that the use of software is a skill and therefore should be taught as such: it is all very well knowing what in theory all the commands on the menus and ribbons are meant to do, but what is important is the ability to apply such commands as you need to the task in hand, quickly and correctly.