Welcome to the Microsoft Excel World Championship: The ‘Super Bowl for nerds’

LAS VEGAS – Like football players taking the field in a giant stadium, the 12 finalists ran through a glowing “hype tunnel”, some wearing jerseys with sponsorship logos. As an announcer bellowed introductions and cameras captured their every move, they approached a neon-lit stage to raucous cheers.

Then the men sat down at desktop computers, opened their Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and began to type.

Excel, a program that does complex math on a human’s behalf, is often associated, rightly, with corporate drudgery.

But in December 2024, in a Las Vegas e-sports arena that typically hosts Fortnite and League of Legends tournaments, finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream.

Organisers called the event the Microsoft Excel World Championship. “Yes, it is a thing,” the official website says.

At stake was a US$5,000 (S$6,790) prize, a pro wrestling-style championship belt and the title of world’s best spreadsheeter.

But organiser Andrew Grigolyunovich is dreaming bigger. He hopes to turn competitive Excel into a popular e-sport where pros compete for million-dollar prizes and big-league glory.

“Excel was always thought of as a back-office product,” said Mr Grigolyunovich, a Sudoku champion from Latvia.

But in Vegas, “these people who are working, I don’t want to say boring jobs – but, you know, regular jobs – they could become stars.”

If that seems too ambitious, we’d like to introduce you to Mr Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco, who watched the action from the front row.

“This is the Super Bowl for Excel nerds,” Mr Oehm said. “If Excel is the center of your universe, this is like hanging out with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.”

The “LeBron James of Excel,” as he was introduced in Vegas, was Diarmuid Early, 39, an Irish financial consultant who lives in New York, who entered the arena in jeans, sandals and a jersey patterned to resemble abdominal muscles.

The Kobe Bryant was Andrew Ngai, 37, a soft-spoken actuary from Australia known as the Annihilator, who began the world championship as its reigning three-time champion.

“We’re friends – for now,” Early joked as they posed for a photo. But his anxiety was palpable.

“I probably take it too seriously,” he said. “I’m very invested in it.”

The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game.

It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs.

If that sounds unfathomably complicated, it was: The players were handed a seven-page instruction booklet.

To prepare, Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of “focus music”.

After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event – “Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!” – the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas.

One example allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter “W” appeared in a spreadsheet.

The aim was to score as many points as possible while staying ahead of rolling eliminations. As cascading answers filled Excel columns, Ngai took a significant lead, to audible gasps. Then he got stuck on a problem, as did Early. Jarman pulled ahead as the two front-runners frantically tried to troubleshoot.

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” Mr Oehm chanted.

A vision for future tournaments

Microsoft introduced Excel in 1985. The company says its suite of office software, which includes Excel, has more than 400 million users. Google has said that more than 3 billion people use its free suite of products, including Gmail and a spreadsheet program called Sheets.

Part of the appeal, and the intimidation factor, of spreadsheets is their undefined scope. Excel can be a dating organiser or a tool for collating a country’s coronavirus caseload, for example.

But for millions of people, it is still just a tool for accomplishing the tasks their corporate overseers assign to them. It may say something about our times that the instruments of our servitude are also the basis of our games.

The first Excel competition, ModelOff, started in 2012. But ModelOff, which featured financial problems that took hours to solve, was not designed with thrills in mind.

When ModelOff was discontinued after seven years, Mr Grigolyunovich, a former competitor, created the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organisation that runs the Excel championship and other events.

The championship – which has several corporate sponsors, including Microsoft – was held in person for the first time in 2024. He said its shortened rounds, eliminations, commentators and pregame “hype tunnel” were designed to raise tension and lure spectators.

“I remember thinking ‘Well, this is ridiculous, why do we have this?’” Jarman, 30, a British financial consultant who lives in Toronto, said of the tunnel. “But it’s all in good fun. And if the other e-sports do it, we should, too.”

Mr Grigolyunovich said his vision for future tournaments includes more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize for the winner.

For now, many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN’s annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships.

The competitors in Vegas said winning requires not just Excel-know how, but also problem-solving acumen, composure under pressure and intuition – or luck. Add the frisson of a live audience, they say, and the competition starts to resemble a sport in its unpredictability, if not physicality.

They seemed less interested in Mr Grigolyunovich’s visions of fame and fortune, and more focused on adjusting to the transformation of their staid, niche hobby into a televised spectacle. Mostly they had come to geek out with fellow Excel buffs. Between rounds, they attended spreadsheeting workshops and added each other on LinkedIn.

More rivalries could help to build some excitement, several contestants said – but they were too polite, and on too friendly terms with one another, to initiate any.

“Basically everything that they do to make it more fun for viewers makes it more traumatic for competitors,” Early said.

There was a bit of celebrity stardust in the air, though, as Early and Ngai fielded a stream of selfie requests.

“This guy is amazing,” one quarter-finalist, Joy Hezekiah Andriamalala, a finance student from Madagascar, said to a reporter after snapping a photo with Ngai. “Do you know him? Personally?”

Ngai, who appeared resigned to the possibility of losing his championship streak, admitted that being a minor celebrity for a few days was “pretty cool”. He said he had started to treat competitive Excel more like a sport than a hobby, setting aside more time to practice.

Onstage, the front-runners tried to prevent Jarman from running away with the championship belt. Early won a semi-final round by turning screens of mazes made of colored cells and emoji into numbers. In the finals, Ngai tried a Hail Mary: filling his remaining cells with random numbers.

As the clock ticked down to zero, Jarman turned to stare at the leaderboard.

“Ten seconds, is anything going to happen?” a commentator, Oz du Soleil, shouted. Nothing did.

Jarman leaped out of his seat and threw his hands in the air, his face gleaming with sweat. The audience erupted. “Look at that! Look at that!” du Soleil yelled.

Jarman held the championship belt aloft as someone dumped glitter on his head. Mr Oehm let out a breath he had been holding.

“You’d never see this with Google Sheets,” he said. “You’d never get this level of passion.” NYTIMES