It's fair to say most of us don't like spreadsheets, but the people who do like them
like them a lot. And while many of us use Microsoft Excel in our day-to-day work,
an elite few have adapted the world's most popular spreadsheet software
into an e-sports phenomenon. In 2022, the Excel World Championship debuted as part of ESPN's
The Ocho, an annual showcase of lower-profile sports like axe throwing, corgi racing, and of
course, the Slippery Stair Climb. The vast majority of viewers had never even conceived of
competitive Excel before, because there are some levels of nerdy that are simply beyond mere mortal
ken. But the sport was popular enough that it was renewed for the 2023 Ocho and will be holding
its finale in the Las Vegas HyperX e-sports arena this December with a prize pool of $10,000 across
But Excel as an e-sport didn't appear out of nowhere fully formed in 2022. It came out of an
existing culture of financial modeling competitions. Basically, these are tournaments where participants
must create a financial forecast for a fictional company based on a provided data set in, what
else, Excel. The organizers of the Financial Modeling World Championship were looking for a
way to turn these competitions into a spectator sport, because apparently the cultural mainstream
is unenthusiastic about debt service coverage ratios, which is a real shame. They gradually
adapted the format to make the contests more exciting and accessible, and in mid-2021,
they went viral. Because, you know, pandemic. Finally, ESPN expressed an interest, and the
FMWC Open was streamed on ESPN3 in December 2021. The next year, Microsoft sponsored the competition,
lending it their own name, and making it the Microsoft Excel World Championship.
But what does a round of competitive Excel actually look like? And how do you Excel enough to win?
Each round of an Excel tournament has a unique challenge, like tabulating the results of a
series of hypothetical elections or projecting the outcome of a game of whack-a-mole. Participants
have to answer a series of 100 increasingly difficult questions about the puzzle in only 30
minutes. That's roughly one answer every 18 seconds, but that assumes that the players are
answering them one at a time, which they aren't, unless time is short and they're desperate.
Questions are typically organized into five batches of 20 questions, and the dominant strategy
by experienced players is to create a single formula that will solve an entire batch. This means
that a player's score can stagnate for long periods, then jump rapidly. It can even go down,
which means it's time for a quick undo. But that might not save novice players who get stuck and
wind up with a big fat zero out of a thousand. The winner is whoever answers all the questions
correctly first or whoever has the most points when the 30 minutes are up. The puzzles can vary
a lot in terms of difficulty, so the points players receive are typically adjusted to normalize scores
across games. An infamous 2021 case based on the game's civilization was so difficult that the
winner managed to get just eight points total, narrowly edging out his opponent who managed to
accumulate a paltry six. Both of them were guessing, which can be executed quickly and
efficiently using the formula rand between to cover large batches of unknown answers. Familiarity
with keyboard shortcuts is obviously a necessary skill, to the point that player BIOS will list
their favorite shortcut. And there's some hot controversy in the meta over whether competitive
players should ever use a mouse to navigate. Advanced players with a fluency and visual
basic might even code on the fly. Unsurprisingly, the game tends to be dominated by accountants,
actuaries, mathematicians, and engineers. You know, the alpha nerds. The format of games can vary as
well, with tournaments sometimes featuring 1v1 elimination matches and other times 8 player
battle royales. It's brutal. A panel of commentators narrate the game, dissect the outcome,
and introduce and interview the players before and after the fact. And at in-person events,
there's often an electric crowd excited to see their favorite Excel battler perform the spreadsheet
equivalent of a mounted elbow drop off the top rope. And it's not a sport without merch. They've
got shirts like this invalid formula, divided by zero design, or this one with all your favorite
formulas. I'm partial to equal count ifs, open, parent, closed, parent, myself. The Microsoft
Excel World Championship isn't the only gaming arena where you'll find Excel. It's had a long,
if eccentric history in gaming, usually acting as an external, supplementary tool for complex
RPGs that require advanced data management. Eve Online, the game sometimes called spreadsheets
in space, actually got an official Excel plug-in earlier this year, much to the excitement of its
player base. Not to mention that people have been programming games directly into Excel for decades,
like Snake, Minesweeper, and even Battleship. If there's anything we can learn from a sweaty
crowd cheering on their favorite Excel champion as they formulate their way to victory, it's that
human beings can find joy in literally anything. And it brings me great joy to see you here at the
end of the video. Welcome! Thanks for watching, like the video if you like it, dislike it if
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forget to subscribe and follow and plug us into your spreadsheet of choice. I know you have it.