There's A World Championship For Excel Spreadsheets

There are some things out there that just really make me question... but why? And this is definitely one of them.

We all have a mate, who for some reason, knows their way around an Excel spreadsheet. But when you ask them: "How do you do it?" They always reply: "I just know".

Well now they can put their knowledge to the test and enter into the world championships of Excel spreadsheets.

The most recent competition was quite rightly held among the glitz and bright lights of Las Vegas - with Andrew 'the Annihilator' Ngai taking home the crown. A senior actuary in central Sydney, it wasn't all plain sailing for 36-year-old Ngai.

“For some unknown reason there was a mismatch between the scoresheet and the live stream,” he told Guardian Australia. “No one really knows why but it got out of sync.”

The glitch was fixed, the scoreboard corrected and the 36-year-old from Sydney stormed to victory on Saturday night, becoming the triple world champion in data processing.

“You didn’t just succeed – you Exceled,” Microsoft told Ngai via its Instagram feed. On X, one fan said the victory “will go down as a historical American sports moment on par with Babe Ruth calling his home run shot in the 1932 World Series”.

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Officially an esport, each round sees eight players presented with a ream of data, plus a set of instructions. Contestants need to create formulas and subsets to process the data, working against the clock to solve stages of the case and earn bonus points. Every seven and a half minutes the lowest scorer is eliminated.

“The nature of this competition is you don’t necessarily have to know everything about Excel to be successful,” Ngai says. “Keeping it simple can be quite effective.”

If you fancy yourself as an Excel whizzkid, why not enter yourself. You never know, you could be seeing a large sum of money in your bank account sooner than you think.