Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title
36 comments
·December 20, 2025buybackoff
xattt
I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.
otterley
It's almost as though organizations are made of human beings who have complicated relationships, differing opinions, and nuanced thinking.
paddy_m
I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?
doctorhandshake
I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.
colmmacc
The Oscars, The Golden Globes, the Emmys, just a few!
chongli
Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.
anamexis
I wonder how you could construct a reasonably controlled competition for film editing.
salviati
You never get to see the action there. Just the finished product.
Waterluvian
I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!
lysace
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. (Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.)
3eb7988a1663
There is also the mocumentary flick of the Excel eTournament scene with "Makro"
two-sandwich
It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?
I enjoy the idea, and love watching it grow.
medell
It used to be financial modeling but they realized they’d get more attention with the esports audience this way.
It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
stackghost
Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
donsupreme
Should be 'Michael Jordan of spreadsheets'
buybackoff
The Spiderman would be better. If anyone used formulas' precedents/dependents that would be instantly visual.
littlestymaar
Did he retired spreadsheets to become a professional baseball player?
jasonthorsness
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
shagie
> but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language
There is little difference between (if (> a b) c d) and =IF((A1 > B1), C1, D1)
Excel is the most widely installed functional programming language IDE.
Bridged7756
Yup. Not too long ago they added Python scripting. Definitely beats the weird cloud scripting you have to do with Google Sheets.
null
d-lisp
Looks a bit like vimgolfing [0]
triclops200
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
Obligatory Krazam sketch: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY?si=h6QR2gzac48R6kca
sieep
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
airstrike
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
jjmarr
Does Microsoft gain useful information about product UX from this? Wondering if any Excel PMs watch this and see where micro-optimizations are made.
lysace
Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
djaouen
Come Feel The Heat With These Great Feats of Spreadsheets lol
Edit: Of course, they changed the title! [1]
sieabahlpark
[dead]
I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.