I’m not going to recommend you watch all seven hours of the livestream of the Excel World Championship Finals however, in the event you begin watching, you may be handled to an distinctive creation: The Excel World Championship theme track. A sort of comfortable rock ballad that’s AI-created however appears to be sung by an precise human, among 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 within the spreadsheet bin?
It’s the battle of the Titans
The finest keyboard tappers within the land
They’ve all been coaching for this second
Who’s getting caught within the perform sand?
Watch On
Beat that Bob Dylan. The Excel World Championships befell in December 2024 and, whereas this wasn’t the primary time the occasion has been held, it was the primary time in-person and (by a distance) the glitziest. Held in a Las Vegas esports enviornment the place the 12 finalists entered the working to booming announcer calls and wild applause, you’d nearly be forgiven for considering you’d came upon some kind of wrestling extravaganza: Until the rivals take their locations in entrance of glowing PCs, and the sport is afoot.
In every spherical, the rivals are set bespoke and extremely complicated Excel puzzles from completely different designers, after which concurrently begin fixing them with the slowest being eradicated. One of the early rounds was based mostly round a World of Warcraft situation, requiring rivals to design a spreadsheet monitoring 20 characters and their stats (why not attempt it for your self).
The championships had a $5,000 high prize, the belt, and naturally the workplace bragging rights. “Excel was at all times considered a back-office product,” organiser Andrew Grigolyunovich advised the New York Times. “[But] these people who find themselves working, I don’t need to say boring jobs—however, you already know, common jobs—they might turn out to be stars.”
Stars might sound a bit a lot, however that is since you’re not sufficiently invested in Excel. “This is the Super Bowl for Excel nerds,” mentioned software program developer Erik Oehm. “If Excel is the middle of your universe, that is like hanging out with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.”
Financial guide Diarmud Early was in reality introduced because the “LeBron James of Excel” whereas Bryant was apparently actuary Andrew Ngai, a three-time champion whose unlikely nickname is The Annihilator. Ngai in reality seemed on-track for his fourth success early on, earlier than getting caught on a very knotty downside that noticed others catch up.
Excel competitions had existed beforehand however Grigolyunovich, who had competed himself, arrange the Financial Modeling World Cup to run the Excel World Championship and different occasions. Grigolyunovich’s intuition to amp-up the pageantry appeared common among the many rivals.
“I bear in mind considering ‘Well, that is ridiculous, why do we have now this?’” mentioned monetary guide Michael Jarman concerning the entrance showmanship. “But it’s all in good enjoyable. And if the opposite e-sports do it, we must always too.”
And “good enjoyable” was undoubtedly the vibe right here. Competitors posed for selfies with the viewers, joked concerning the pleasant rivalries, and the gang knew its position, offering dramatic “oohs” at particularly tense spreadsheet-fiddling moments. “You’d by no means see this with Google Sheets,” mentioned Oehm. You’d by no means get this stage of ardour.”
It is difficult to guage the tone of this occasion. It is, on the one hand, a knowingly ironic celebration of a chunk of software program that almost all of us affiliate with places of work and the not-fun bits of labor, excessive with the razzle-dazzle. But on the opposite, and also you see this within the enthusiasm of the viewers and within the chat from these watching on-line, there’s a genuinely unironic love of Excel, right here. A celebratory ambiance constructed round one of the vital ubiquitous items of enterprise software program on the planet. Lots of people spend a whole lot of time in Excel and, whether or not you are being paid or not, you get connected to those issues.
But there did should be a winner. From an inauspicious starting, Jarman led the pack within the closing problem. LeBron and Kobe had fallen off, and have been desperately attempting for the last-minute system that would one way or the other flip issues round. But because the seconds ticked down, Jarman stayed in entrance, after which it was over: Jarman jumped out of his seat, the viewers roared, and shortly sufficient he was holding his championship belt aloft because the room went wild.
One of essentially the most amusing issues is that the commentators, understandably, are a little bit bit misplaced at attempting to clarify what the rivals are doing: Excel is just not precisely a pure spectator sport, which after all is sort of the purpose. There’s an awesome second within the closing when one thing on the display screen adjustments and the commentator simply says “no matter he did, it labored!” Come the Excel World Championships 2025, perhaps that needs to be the tagline.
