Born and living in Hamburg, Germany. Started working with computers in 1986, developed software for computer-aided production data acquisition. Joined StarDivision in 1993, and the StarCalc spreadsheet application's team in 1994. Since the year 2000 also deeply involved with the i18n framework, partly arisen from the various needs of the number parser/formatter used in Calc and other OOo applications, coordinating the related work. Since 2006 a member of the OASIS OpenDocument Format committee, working on the formula specification (ODFF aka OpenFormula).