Inside the 'mind-blowing' world of competitive spreadsheeting
An Excel enthusiast delivers the lowdown from the world champs in Las Vegas.
For some people, Excel spreadsheets are organisational heaven. For others, they're more like hell.
For Giles Male, though, buzzing around a spreadsheet, fixing up rows and columns, is an exciting and "crazy competitive" live esport.
"You've got a room full of people cheering, watching others play around with spreadsheets on a screen. It's pretty mind-blowing," he tells RNZ's Saturday Morning.
Giles Male (in the white suit jacket) salutes a competitor at this year's Microsoft Excel World Championships.
Damian
Spreadsheeting as a competitive esport has been around for about a decade now, Male says, but in the last two years it's "just gone to stratospheric levels" thanks to the annual Microsoft Excel World Championships, where players compete for the prestigious Excel world champion, a wrestling-style winner's belt and a US$60,000 (NZ$108,000) cash prize.
The event features a series of spreadsheets "battles" in which 12 players onstage are simultaneously sent a problem-ridden Excel file they must fix up within 30 minutes.
"I know it sounds silly because it's spreadsheets, but there is a huge amount of pressure on these top players when you're on a stage.
"If you start to fall behind in the points, you might have the camera crews in the arena start to zoom in on you, because they think you might get eliminated."
In a live spreadsheeting competition, Giles Male says there's a "huge amount of pressure" on the top players.
Damian
After filling in as a commentator at last year's Excel World Championships, Male commentated the Collegiate Challenge at this year's event in Las Vegas.
"As you can imagine, it's quite hard commentating on an Excel spreadsheet battle for 30 minutes nonstop, trying to explain what people are doing in a spreadsheet on a screen… [but] it's a great challenge. I really, really enjoy it."
At the very highest level of Excel athleticism, there are around 40 or 50 players, he says, and "in a pack below" hundreds who are very, very good.
(Male gives a shout-out to Waikato spreadsheeters Nick and Ella Boberg - the "power couple of Excel".)
Giles Male captures a fellow fan's excitement at the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championships.
Damian
While spreadsheeters are a mixture of ages and have varying backgrounds and job titles, he says, the very top players are likely people who use Excel "day in, day out".
Usually, they're very strong academically, too, often with a mathematics background.
For a serious spreadsheeter, it's also critical to keep up with the latest Excel functions, Male says, like the "pretty complex" LAMBDA - a new area where users can create their own custom functions.
While he appreciates LAMBDA, his personal favourite Excel offering is XLOOKUP.
"If you don't know XLOOKUP, it's replaced VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP. For anybody that uses those two - stop it. Now you should be using XLOOKUP."
Competitors in the 2024 Microsoft Excel World Championship.
YouTube screenshot
After realising about 20 years ago he was "the one everybody starts going to when they've got a spreadsheet problem", Male started his own spreadsheet-building business and went on to become an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Microsoft.
Pointing out that he's "not paid to say it", Excel remains the gold standard when it comes to spreadsheeting software, he says.
"Rubbish" is his verdict on Apple's Numbers, and Google Sheets doesn't compare, although it now does some things better than Microsoft's tool.
"That's been really good for Excel because it kind of keeps them on their toes. "
To anyone keen to explore competitive spreadsheeting, Male recommends the games on the Excel Esports platform.
"I promise you, it's really addictive once you get into it."
