The 'Super Bowl for Nerds': Scenes from the Microsoft Excel World Championship (straitstimes.com) 28
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."
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."
Yeah, yeah... (Score:3, Funny)
Excel, an "expert" jumping in hoops for hours to get the chart that three lines of gnuplot will give to a complete noob in 10 minutes, including RTFM.
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Nerds? (Score:2)
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From TFS: 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
It doesn't matter how you slice, that is nerdy AF.
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Look: I didn't find spreadsheets fun, definitely falls into "you do you" category. On the other hand I'm pretty sure other people do, and excel is by far the most widely used one (well maybe gsuite is but that sucks at everything).
I don't think sponsoring the event is any more cyclical than a game company sponsoring a game contest. I am generally super critical of Microsoft (did they even sponsor it?) and have been since the 90s. Bit even I'm not feeling this one. I'd a bunch of nerds doing nerdy things for
Borland Quattro "Breakout" game (Score:2)
I read somewhere that, in the 1980s, Borland had a demo for its Quattro spreadsheet which played breakout on screen. They claimed it used 100% compatible macros at that time
"Experts" vs AI (Score:2)
Excel, an "expert" jumping in hoops for hours to get the chart that three lines of gnuplot will give to a complete noob in 10 minutes, including RTFM.
Nobody is "jumping in hoops for hours" to produce a chart in Excel. What are you talking about?
Copilot will produce a chart for you in Excel with simple plain language prompting. It takes more like 2 minutes than 10 minutes and reading a manual.
pieces (Score:3)
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Did you build an Excel spreadsheet for the cost comparison? Can you share? Asking for a friend.
I dunno... (Score:2)
Are we sure this wasn't an article from The Onion?
They should broadcast code editing championships (Score:2)
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There's a Vim-like extension for VS Code. It supports basically all the common commands (it lacks the ability to run vim scripts).
I've used VS Code like that and it's highly usable. Of course, anyone who doesn't know how to use vim would wonder what's wrong with your VS Code.
I install it because I'm just too used to using Vim for coding, so it actually makes VS Code usable for me.
Trade offs (Score:2)
Excel can give you some nice graphics (fast), but the cell-based "addressing" gets in the way of real programming real quick.
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Re: ESPN3 and MICROSOFT (Score:2)
One of participant left with a broken jaw (Score:3)
He slipped down the stairs, he said. Hotel security is looking closely at CCTV footage, and they haven't ruled out foul play, nor syndicate involvement
What a horrible countdown (Score:2)
They counted down to 1! Pathetic. Real nerd sports count down to 0 because zero-indexing is the one true way!
Excel experts club... (Score:3)
How to put this? You're an excel expert. God's gift to rows and columns. Hey look at those fat little fingers fly. Is that all you've got? Sorry bro, you came to the wrong club. You will find yours a little down the street, across the tracks, and under the bridge. Bring your own cardboard box.
"could, but should?" (Score:2)
Decades ago, I wrote some excel code to make the workbook play Pong against itself (in an excel Graph page).
Whenever some dweeb said "I can do [some algorithm or function] in Excel,," I'd crank up my Pong demo.
Just because you can do it in Excel by no means implies you should.
Excel, really? Seriously? (Score:1)
The SuperBowl for nerds, surely, would have to be something much, much nerdier. The IOCCC perhaps, or the ongoing work on the Reimann hypothesis, something like that. Something *nerds* would care about.
Well, I guess Excel is Touring complete (Score:2)