That was the scene when I first discovered Microsoft Excel Esports and watched the 2023 Microsoft Excel World Championship.
It was equal parts thrilling and fascinating.
Who Runs Excel Esports?
So, there are some small connections.
How Do Excel Esports Even Work?
In the MEWC the tasks are never financial.
They are logic challenges that do not require any pre-existing content knowledge besides familiarity with Microsoft Excel.
Creativity is encouraged by only scoring the numeric answers of each task.
Contestants have 30 minutes to complete all the tasks and are free to seek the solution however they want.
Formatting and style are also not judged.
Anyone Can Enter
I applaud the organizers for inclusion.
They seem to have gone out of their way to remove any potential obstacles to entry.
All 10 qualifying roundsandthe playoffs are online.
Each player’s 30-minute session begins according to their time zone.The complete rules for the championshipare pretty relaxed.
you’re free to Do It!
Is your curiosity piqued?
Are you ready to enter?
Well, there’s still time!
Only seven of the 10 open qualifying battles have been played.
There are twomore occurring in 2024: September 19th and October 10th.
Here is the introduction to the first task.
I was immediately overwhelmed.
I have never needed to do tasks that navigated around a spreadsheet in that way!
I’m curious about what profession would need to use Microsoft Excel like this.
My technique would only involve the SUM function for this one.
Let’s skip ahead to level 4.
It took me more than a minute just to reread this task enough to understand it.
However, once I processed it, I think I could make a decent attempt at this one.
Honestly, I’m not sure whether I’d make it further than this level in 30 minutes.
I’ve taken a screenshot of the Level 8 task from the Battle 1 livestream to demonstrate.
Points are assigned according to each correct answer.
This player has 565 points from his completed work.
In the online rounds, players wouldn’t receive their scores until after they turned in their work.
They also capture player keystrokes and explain many of the functions players are using.
The only improvement I’d suggest is increasing the Championship prize to more than $3,000 (USD).
Last year’s champion had to travel to Las Vegas from Australia for the in-person finals.
That said, this is one Esport win that would look great on a resume.
I don’t think I’m quite ready to compete.
Learning new functions in Excel has never been more exciting!
