The Microsoft researcher was, by his own admission, already going through something of a midlife crisis. But it was the woman sitting next to him on a flight who, with her spreadsheet, changed the course of his career. His new path would put him at the centre of an effort to bring the power of computer code to those who are unable to write it themselves, which is to say the vast majority of us.

I met Sumit Gulwani in Vienna this month at the annual workshop for Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets, where he was the keynote speaker. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. It was this, along with his role at Microsoft, that so impressed his fellow passenger when he was returning from a seminar five years ago. With such credentials, surely he could help her with the text manipulations she was struggling with in an Excel spreadsheet?

“At that time, I had to excuse myself out of the situation,” he tells me when we sit down in a courtyard to talk after his speech. “I’d never used Excel before in my life.”