Born and raised in Germany, I moved to New Zealand in 2001 with my family. I live in New Plymouth, at the base of the Taranaki mountain with my husband and two sons.

I am a plain vanilla end user of Microsoft Office applications like Excel, Word and Powerpoint. In 2011 I started exploring SharePoint 2010 as an administrator and site owner.

MS Office and SharePoint are the tools I use every day to do my job. I like to find out about their capabilities and I like to share what I find with as many people as possible. One of my goals is to teach people how to use the regular commands and functions to do their work. I encounter many requests for code, although the built-in functionality already does the job nicely. People just don’t know enough about how to make it work.

After hours, I often answer questions in on-line Q&A sites like Experts Exchange, Microsoft Community and the Stack Exchange network.

Apart from that, I enjoy drawing, especially with coloured pencils and pastels, and playing the cello in chamber music and orchestral settings.

What’s with the name “teylyn”? — It is a handle I’ve used for years. I’ve made it up. It resembles the Welsh word “telyn”, which means “harp”.

In January 2012, I was recognised with the Microsoft MVP award for Excel for the first time and re-awarded every year since then.