Excel e-sports: the ‘Olympics’ of spreadsheets is a fun twist on serious software

MICROSOFT Excel – the epitome of office drudgery – has a lesser-known side: as an adrenaline-fuelled sport where “data athletes” face off in “spreadsheet battles”.

Picture a neon-lit gaming arena where Excel enthusiasts from all over the world solve unusual games as the timer counts down, cheered on by live game commentators and fervent fans.

That’s a typical scene at the Microsoft Excel World Championship, where Excel whizzes turn a mundane office tool into a sporting battleground. The finals of this year’s edition is set to take place from Dec 2 to 4 in the glitzy city of Las Vegas.

Like any other sport, the world of competitive Excel has its star athletes. Australia’s Andrew Ngai is an actuary by profession, but on the Excel stage, he is a reigning champion nicknamed “The Annihilator”. Another iconic player, Diarmuid Early, is known as the LeBron James of Excel, after the basketball legend.

Giving Excel the e-sports treatment may seem counterintuitive. But spreadsheet battles actually work well as a “spectator-oriented” event, says Andrew Grigolyunovich, founder of the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC), which organises the championship.

In conceptualising the event, he questioned why Excel e-sports should not have all the trappings of live televised sporting events.

“Why not have arenas full of cheering crowds, prize money cheques… media coverage, spotlights, professional athletes and so on? That was the vision and right now we’ve accomplished quite a few of those things,” Grigolyunovich told me over a video call.

In an Excel showdown, players solve themed challenges that are sometimes inspired by popular games – such as tetris and baccarat – or simulate real-life scenarios, such as navigating city traffic. These games tap players’ knowledge of Excel functions, their logical reasoning abilities and creativity.

The game design often pays creative homage to commonly used Excel functions. In one challenge, competitors had to calculate the earnings of a gem-mining dwarf called “Vlookie” and his brother “Xlookie” – named after the VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP functions on Excel that locate specific items in data sets.

“One of the players liked Vlookie so much that she created a specially-designed T-shirt with (it),” says Grigolyunovich, also musing that he should’ve worn his Excel gamer T-shirt for our interview.

Formula for success

Grigolyunovich’s interest in Excel stemmed from work. He tapped the software to prepare cash flow models and financial statements as a young finance professional in Latvia, which had only transitioned from socialism to a market economy from the 1990s.

To improve his Excel skills, Grigolyunovich took part in a tournament known as ModelOff, where players used the software to solve financial questions. Grigolyunovich was an active participant, making it to the finals twice, in 2016 and 2017. In the latter year, he ranked fifth globally.

When ModelOff later ceased after its 2019 edition, Grigolyunovich was inspired to create a similar competition with better features. This led to him starting the FMWC, which organises monthly competitions in financial modelling and Excel.

His efforts caught the attention of sports channel ESPN, which in December 2021 streamed the “FMWC Open 2021” (as the Excel championship was then known) on the ESPN3 channel. An all-star Excel battle later made it to the ESPN2 channel in 2022.

Last year marked the first time that the Excel championship was held in-person, at an e-sports arena in Las Vegas. Since then, enthusiasm for Excel e-sports has grown substantially, with wide media coverage and a cult following.

The next “LeBron James”

For anyone looking to become an Excel athlete, Grigolyunovich emphasises that a background in finance is not actually necessary.

“You don’t need to have a financial education; all you need to have is good logical thinking and knowledge of some Excel functions – the more you know, the more efficient you might be,” he says.

Grigolyunovich recommends that aspiring players simply go through the Excel files from past competitions – available on the FMWC website – and understand how each challenge works.

“Our top players actually have YouTube channels; they’re very niche, showing very specific and advanced ways of how to solve things,” he says.

Grigolyunovich hopes that the Excel championship will get bigger from here – with athletes who enter the e-sport full-time and possibly even prize money that exceeds a million dollars. There is also a growing network of local Excel e-sports chapters and competitions all around the world.

The pursuit appears to be gaining some interest here in Singapore as well. In 2022, local media outlet CNA profiled a Singapore student taking part in the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge, also organised by the FMWC.

It may only be a matter of time before Singapore produces its own LeBron James or Annihilator of the Excel world.

Excel e-sports is just one of many weird and wonderful phenomena out there. This column charts away from the news and into a random array of curiosities, in fields from finance and economics to science and psychology, or even beyond.