Is Microsoft Excel the Next Big E-Sport?

Like football players on the field in a giant stadium, the final 12 ran through the glittering “hype tunnel”, some wearing uniforms with pictures of supporters. As an announcer howled their intro and their reaction was caught on camera, they approached a neon-lit stage to cheer.

Then the men sat down at a desktop computer, opened a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and began to write.

Excel, a program that performs complex calculations on one’s behalf, is often associated with the hard work of a company. But last month, at the Las Vegas e-sports arena that usually hosts Fortnite and League of Legends tournaments, the tablet-savvy financial professionals were treated like minor celebrities. when they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people. , and more watch live on ESPN3.

Organizers call the event the Microsoft Excel World Championship. “Well, it’s a thing,” says the official website.

A $5,000 prize, a wrestling championship belt and the world’s best title. But the organizer, Andrew Grigolyunovich, dreams bigger. He hopes to turn the Excel competition into a popular e-sports where professionals compete for multi-million dollar prizes and big league honors.

“Excel was always thought of as a back-office product,” said Mr. Grigolyunovich, a Sudoku champion from Latvia. But in Vegas, “those people who work, I don’t want to say boring work — but, you know, steady work — they can become stars.”

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

“This is the Super Bowl for Excel nerds,” Mr. Oehm said. “If Excel was the center of the world, it would be like having LeBron James and Kobe Bryant together.”

The “LeBron James of Excel,” as he was introduced in Vegas, was Diarmuid Early, 39, an Irish financial consultant living in New York, who entered the arena wearing jeans, sandals and a matching uniform. in the abdominal muscles. Kobe Bryant is 37-year-old Andrew Ngai, a soft-spoken actuary from Australia known as the Annihilator, who started the World Cup as a three-time champion.

“We’re friends — right now,” Mr. Early joked as they posed for pictures. But his concern was evident.

“I can take it too seriously,” he said. “I’m really invested in it.”

The format for the final is a parody of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It took 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly men) to develop Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and vital signs. If that sounds overwhelming, it is: The players were given a seven-page instruction booklet.

To prepare, Mr. Early adjusted the width of his Excel post by having a guard line up for a 3-point shot. Mr. Ngai’s “focused music” is listed on YouTube.

After the announcer began the 40-minute event — “Five, four, three, two, one and Excel!” – the 12 players leaned on the keyboard and started entering formulas. An example: “=CountChar(Bottom(D5),”W”)” allowed a contestant, Michael Jarman, to guess how many times the letter “W” appeared in the plate.

The goal is to score as many points as possible while staying ahead of the rolling eliminations. As a flurry of responses filled the Excel column, Mr. Ngai took a big lead, drawing an audible gasp. Then he got stuck in trouble, like Mr. Early. Mr. Jarman moved forward while the first two runners tried to solve a problem.

“Oh, oh, oh,” said Mr. Oehm.

‘That’s funny.’

The first electronic spreadsheet was VisiCalc, an “electronic desk” that did pen and paper calculations. Microsoft introduced Excel in 1985. The company says its suite of office software, which includes Excel, has more than 400 million users. (Google says more than three billion people use its free products, including Gmail and a spreadsheet program called Sheets.)

Part of the appeal, and the reason for the intimidation, of the tablet is the undefined field. Excel can be a dating organizer or a tool to compile the country’s coronavirus burden, for example.

Speaking philosophically, Bob Frankston, the founder of VisiCalc, said that people who treat Excel as a financial tool are ignoring its potential. “They don’t realize that their minds are mirrors,” he said. “The financial planning tools they find are in their heads.”

But for millions of people, it’s still just a tool to get the job done for them by the company’s managers. It may also say something about our time, but the instruments of our service are also the basis of our game.

The first Excel competition, ModelOff, started in 2012. But ModelOff, which featured financial problems that took hours to solve, wasn’t done on a whim.

When ModelOff was discontinued after seven years, Mr. Grigolyunovich, a former competitor, created the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization that runs the Excel Championship and other events. The championship – which has a number of corporate sponsors, including Microsoft – was held exclusively for the first time last year. He said the short rounds, eliminations, commentators and “hype tunnel” before the match were meant to raise the tension and excite the audience.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is ridiculous, why do we have this?’ ” said Mr. Jarman, 30, a British financial consultant living in Toronto, about the tunnel. “But it’s all in fun. And if other e-sports are doing it, so should we. “

Mr. Grigolyunovich said his vision for future tournaments includes more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize for the winner. Today, many fans watch the Excel Championship on ESPN’s annual sports show, where it sits between competitions like speed chess and World Dog Surfing. Championships.

A reluctant competitor

The Vegas competitor said that winning requires not only Excel-knowledge, but also problem-solving, calmness under pressure and intuition – or luck. Add the frisson of a live audience, they say, and the competition begins to resemble a sport in the unexpected, if not the physical.

They seemed less interested in Mr. Grigolyunovich’s vision of fame and fortune, and more focused on conforming by changing their personal pastime to watching television. Most of them came with fellow Excel enthusiasts. Between rounds, they attended a whiteboarding workshop and helped each other on LinkedIn.

More rivalry would have helped build excitement, several contestants said – but they were too polite, and too conciliatory, to do anything.

“Basically, anything they do to make them more fun for the spectators makes it more fun for the competitors,” Mr Early said.

Even so, there was the famous stardust in the air, because Mr. Early and Mr. Ngai, LeBron and Kobe in Excel, filed a selfie request.

“This man is amazing,” Joy Hezekiah Andriamalala, a finance student from Madagascar, told reporters after taking a photo with Mr. Ngai. “Do you know him? specifically?”

Mr Ngai, who seemed resigned to the prospect of losing the championship, admitted it was “very good” to be a minor celebrity for a few days. He said he started treating competitive Excel more like a sport than a hobby, devoting more time to practice.

On the stage, the runners tried to stop Mr. Jarman from running away with the championship belt. Mr. Early won the semi-final round by converting a picture of a beer made of colored cells and emoji into numbers. In the finals, Mr. Ngai tried an Ail Mary: filling the remaining cells with random numbers.

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

“Ten seconds, is something going to happen?” One reviewer, Oz du Soleil, said. No one did.

Mr. Jarman jumped out of his chair and threw his hands in the air, his face glistening with sweat. The audience roared. “Look at that! Look at that!” Mr. du Soleil shouted.

Mr. Jarman was holding the championship belt aloft when someone threw lightning bolts at his head. Mr. Oehm let out a breath he had been holding.

“You’ll never see that in Google Sheets,” he said. “You will never understand this level of love.”