The 'Super Bowl for Nerds': Scenes from the Microsoft Excel World Championship

At December's 'Microsoft Excel World Championship' in Las Vegas, 'finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities,' writes the New York Times, 'as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream.'

The Times notes that 'many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships.' But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with 'more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize' — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt.

The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of 'focus music'. After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — 'Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!' — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: '=CountChar (Lower (D5),'W')' allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter 'W' appeared in a spreadsheet.

ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's 'worth checking out for the opening theme song alone.'

The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event 'the Super Bowl for Excel nerds'. Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said...

'You'd never see this with Google Sheets. You'd never get this level of passion.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.