The story of Quadrant starts with a tale of frustration, bureacracy and corporate IT. The organisation I worked for at the time relocated about Chrismas time 1996. We moved into a wonderful new building with swish new open-plan offices and a brand new "one size fits all" PC on every desk. Fine and dandy, until we wanted to use some of our old specialist (not MS Office) software. "Sorry, that will have to be checked out by the corporate IT people before we can risk putting it onto your networked PC. The policy is that every piece of software has to be checked and passed for compatibility with the corporate standard stuff. And, by the way, we now have at least a six-week backlog before we can even look at your software, and you will have to buy new licences so we can put it on the network etc. etc". This isn't exactly how it happened, but you get the picture. Anyway, eventually, several months later (and still no sign of our old tools, which had failed the test) I had an urgent job to do. I needed to use a Monte-Carlo type tool in Excel, and didn't have it. I had been writing VBA macros in Excel to do other analysis. I decided to buck the system and use what I had to do the job I wanted.
A few (some "really") late nights over the next few weeks, including figuring out why Excel forced me to do things in certain ways, and I had the core of what I needed. An Iteration Engine that I could drive from within an Excel spreadsheet (version 5 & 95 at the time).
After a while, I decided to put a simple control dialog box on the front end to make my gizmo easier to use and Quadrant, my "QUick And Dirty Risk ANalysis Tool", was born and named in late January 1998. At this stage I was happy to have solved my own problem, and to have a useful tool that I and others could use. A few of my colleagues may even still have their copies of Quadrant. I doubt that anyone still uses it, though. It did need a bit of a polish, but was pretty good for a 30k or so add-in. Most important of all, it did the job. It was very simple. It was all I needed. I hadn't needed to wait for the IT people to tell me that the commercial Monte-Carlo risk analysis package had failed the compatibility test and I couldn't have it anyway.
A couple of job moves and lots of studying* since Quadrant was born has meant that I have developed it only very slowly, with friends and colleagues as beta-testers. I've added a couple of more ways to control how the results are presented, tidied up the iteration engine and fixed a few "anomalies" as well as converting it to Excel 97's object model in the meantime, but Quadrant is still fairly small and simple. It doesn't hide anything and still doesn't know how to hurt Excel.
*(MBA with the Open University in UK, hard work but rewarding, recommended)