It started with fixing other people's spreadsheets.
J&D B.V. is five people working from a converted ground floor on the Zuiddijk in Zaandam. We teach one subject, in six modules, to learners across Canada. That is the whole business.
A Friday hour that got out of hand
Joost and Daphne met working in operations at a logistics firm outside Amsterdam. Between them they spent an unreasonable share of each week repairing files: a planning sheet where someone had merged the header cells, a monthly report that broke every time a new depot was added, a chart that showed a rise that wasn't there.
In 2019 they started running an hour on Friday afternoons for colleagues who wanted to stop being at the mercy of those files. It was meant to be four sessions. It ran for two years, and the people who came were not analysts — they were schedulers, coordinators, an HR administrator, someone from finance who wanted to check her own totals.
The thing that made it work was that nobody watched a demonstration and went home. Everyone opened the broken file and tried.
When a former colleague moved to Ottawa and asked whether she could join remotely, the time difference turned out to be an advantage rather than a problem: mid-afternoon in Zaandam is late morning across most of Canada. She told two people, they told others, and by the time it stopped fitting into Friday afternoons, most of the group was Canadian. We registered J&D B.V. in 2022 and rebuilt the material properly as six modules.
- Founded 2022; teaching since 2019
- Registered in the Netherlands as a besloten vennootschap (B.V.)
- Five people: two full-time, three part-time
- No investors and no marketing budget; income is module fees
- One subject only — practical digital and data skills
- Groups capped at 18, which limits how large we can become
- Most learners arrive through someone who took a module
A Dutch company teaching Canadian learners is a slightly odd sentence
So here is the honest explanation. It began by accident, with one person in Ottawa, and it continued because it worked.
The overlap in the working day is the practical reason. Our afternoon lands in the Canadian morning, so live sessions sit inside a normal workday for learners from Newfoundland to British Columbia, without anyone teaching or studying at midnight.
The material fits too. Excel and Google Sheets behave the same on both sides of the Atlantic, and the open data we use in exercises — Statistics Canada tables, municipal open-data portals — is well documented and freely available, which makes it good teaching material. Date formats and spelling in the exercise files follow Canadian conventions, because that is what our learners hand in.
We are, to be clear, a Netherlands-based company. We have no office, staff or legal presence in Canada, we are not a registered educational institution under any provincial or territorial legislation, and everything we do is delivered online. If you need a recognised Canadian credential, a college or provincially designated institution is the right place to look, and we will say so if you ask.
Five people, and what each of them is responsible for
Everyone here teaches, including the two of us who also do the invoicing. Nobody's title is bigger than their job.
- Joost Merkelbach
- Twelve years in operations planning before this, most of it inside spreadsheets that other people had built. Writes and teaches M1 and M2, and maintains the exercise files. Believes most spreadsheet problems are layout problems wearing a formula costume.
- Daphne van Rooijen
- Background in adult education and workplace training. Designs how the modules are sequenced and writes most of the feedback on submitted exercises. Teaches M3, the module about what a number actually says.
- Rik Boonstra
- Came from municipal reporting, where he built the monthly figures for a mid-sized Dutch council. Teaches M4 and M5. Has a standing rule that a chart which needs a paragraph of explanation is not finished.
- Ilse Broekhuizen
- Worked in IT support for a school board, which is where she learned how shared drives really get used. Teaches M6, and reviews all our materials for keyboard access, colour contrast and screen-reader behaviour.
- Naomi de Jager
- Answers the contact form, runs enrolment and manages the six Canadian time zones on our calendar. If you write to us, Naomi reads it first. She also keeps the record of which questions keep recurring, which is how modules get revised.
How the material changes
Every module, every time
Questions that came up in the live sessions are logged. When the same question appears in three consecutive groups, the material is wrong, not the learners, and that section gets rewritten.
Twice a year
Exercise files are checked against current versions of Excel and Google Sheets. Interfaces move; a course that teaches a menu path that no longer exists is worse than useless.
When we get it wrong
If a session was poorly run or a file was broken, we say so in the module thread and reschedule. It has happened. We'd rather record it than quietly patch it.
Zuiddijk, Zaandam
A ground-floor room on the dike, ten minutes from Zaandam station and about twenty from Amsterdam Centraal. There is no reception and no classroom — all teaching happens online — but the address is real and the phone is answered.
- Registered nameJ&D B.V.
- AddressZuiddijk 416, 1505 HE Zaandam, Netherlands
- Telephone+31 75 303 4120 · Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 CET
- Email[email protected]
- DeliveryOnline only, to learners across Canada
- Language of instructionEnglish
Educational content only
J&D B.V. is a private company providing educational content. We are not an accredited or government-recognised educational institution in the Netherlands or in any Canadian province or territory. We do not provide career placement, recruitment, consulting, data services, or regulated professional advice, and we make no claims about employment, income or other outcomes arising from our modules.