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The Verge's David Pierce reports on the Excel World Championship from Vegas

The Verge's David Pierce reports on the Excel World Championship from Vegas

 


In a featured article for The Verge, David Pierce explores the world of Excel competition, highlighting its rise from amateur activity to potential esports, showcased at the Excel World Championship in Las Vegas. Top spreadsheet enthusiasts competed at the MGM Grand to solve complex Excel challenges, highlighting the transformative power and ubiquity of spreadsheets in business and entertainment. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only on an amateur basis. Most people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants and investors play Excel like I play Scrabble or crosswords – exercising your brain using tools you understand . But last year's contest became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, organizers are trying to cash in on it. After all, someone pointed out to me that poker is just math, and it's all over the TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now he hopes to become a sport. I realized during my two days in that ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The people in this room make a living from their ability to take a complex thing – a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car – and dismantle it into its many components. If you can reduce the world to a set of rows and columns, you can control it. Handle it. Build and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with just a few keyboard shortcuts and an undo button at your fingertips. A good worksheet shows you the universe and gives you the opportunity to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved shirts, are the gods of Olympus, bending everything to their will.

There's one inevitably strange thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets aren't fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at FMWC is, in practice, virtually indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do on spreadsheets every day. You can change the format, shorten the deadlines and raise the stakes as much as you want. The reality is that you're still asking a group of people who create spreadsheets for a living to just create more spreadsheets, even if they do. in Vegas. However, you really cannot overestimate the importance and ubiquity of spreadsheets. “Electronic spreadsheets” actually date back to a time before computers and are perhaps the most important reason why computers became common. In the late 1970s, Dan Bricklin, an MBA student at Harvard, began to imagine software that could automatically perform the calculations he was constantly doing over and over in class. “I imagined a magic table where if you erased one number and wrote something new, all the other numbers would change automatically, like a word processor with numbers,” he said in a TED talk in 2016. It seems strange and obvious today, but it was revolutionary at the time. […]

Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only on an amateur basis. Most people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants and investors play Excel like I play Scrabble or crosswords – exercising your brain using tools you understand . But last year's contest became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, organizers are trying to cash in on it. After all, someone pointed out to me that poker is just math, and it's all over the TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now he hopes to become a sport. I realized during my two days in that ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The people in this room make a living from their ability to take a complex thing – a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car – and dismantle it into its many components. If you can reduce the world to a set of rows and columns, you can control it. Handle it. Build and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with just a few keyboard shortcuts and an undo button at your fingertips. A good worksheet shows you the universe and gives you the opportunity to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved shirts, are the gods of Olympus, bending everything to their will.

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