Who's going in the spreadsheet bin?
I’m not going to suggest you watch all seven hours of the livestream of the Excel World Championship Finals but, if you start watching, you’ll be treated to an exceptional creation: The Excel World Championship theme song. A kind of soft rock ballad that is AI-created but seems to be sung by an actual human, some of the lyrics to this masterpiece go as follows:
It’s the Excel World Championship
Who’s going to win?
It’s the Excel World Championship
Who’s going in the spreadsheet bin?
It’s the battle of the Titans
The best keyboard tappers in the land
They’ve all been training for this moment
Who’s getting stuck in the function sand?
Beat that Bob Dylan. The Excel World Championships took place in December 2024 and, while this wasn’t the first time the event has been held, it was the first time in-person and (by a distance) the glitziest. Held in a Las Vegas esports arena where the 12 finalists entered the running to booming announcer calls and wild applause, you’d almost be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled on some sort of wrestling extravaganza: Until the competitors take their places in front of glowing PCs, and the game is afoot.
In each round, the competitors are set bespoke and highly complex Excel puzzles from different designers, and then simultaneously start solving them with the slowest being eliminated. One of the early rounds was based around a World of Warcraft scenario, requiring competitors to design a spreadsheet tracking 20 characters and their stats (why not try it for yourself).
The championships had a $5,000 top prize, the belt, and of course the office bragging rights. “Excel was always thought of as a back-office product,” organiser Andrew Grigolyunovich told the New York Times. “[But] these people who are working, I don’t want to say boring jobs—but, you know, regular jobs—they could become stars.”
Stars might seem a bit much, but that’s because you’re not sufficiently invested in Excel. “This is the Super Bowl for Excel nerds,” said software developer Erik Oehm. “If Excel is the center of your universe, this is like hanging out with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.”
Financial consultant Diarmud Early was in fact announced as the “LeBron James of Excel” while Bryant was apparently actuary Andrew Ngai, a three-time champion whose unlikely nickname is The Annihilator. Ngai in fact looked on-track for his fourth success early on, before getting stuck on a particularly knotty problem that saw others catch up.
Excel competitions had existed previously but Grigolyunovich, who had competed himself, set up the Financial Modeling World Cup to run the Excel World Championship and other events. Grigolyunovich’s instinct to amp-up the pageantry seemed popular among the competitors.
“I remember thinking ‘Well, this is ridiculous, why do we have this?’” said financial consultant Michael Jarman about the entrance showmanship. “But it’s all in good fun. And if the other e-sports do it, we should too.”
And “good fun” was definitely the vibe here. Competitors posed for selfies with the audience, joked about the friendly rivalries, and the crowd knew its role, providing dramatic “oohs” at especially tense spreadsheet-fiddling moments. “You’d never see this with Google Sheets,” said Oehm. You’d never get this level of passion.”
It is hard to judge the tone of this event. It is, on the one hand, a knowingly ironic celebration of a piece of software that most of us associate with offices and the not-fun bits of work, over the top with the razzle-dazzle. But on the other, and you see this in the enthusiasm of the audience and in the chat from those watching online, there is a genuinely unironic love of Excel, here. A celebratory atmosphere built around one of the most ubiquitous pieces of business software on the planet. A lot of people spend a lot of time in Excel and, whether you’re being paid or not, you get attached to these things.
But there did have to be a winner. From an inauspicious beginning, Jarman led the pack in the final challenge. LeBron and Kobe had fallen off, and were desperately trying for the last-minute formula that could somehow turn things around. But as the seconds ticked down, Jarman stayed in front, and then it was over: Jarman jumped out of his seat, the audience roared, and soon enough he was holding his championship belt aloft as the room went wild.
One of the most amusing things is that the commentators, understandably, are a little bit lost at trying to explain what the competitors are doing: Excel is not exactly a natural spectator sport, which of course is kind of the point. There’s a great moment in the final when something on the screen changes and the commentator just says “whatever he did, it worked!” Come the Excel World Championships 2025, maybe that should be the tagline.
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