I'm not going to suggest you watch all seven hours of the livestream of the Excel World Championship Finals but, if you start watching, you'll be treated to an exceptional creation: The Excel World Championship theme song. A kind of soft rock ballad that is AI-created but seems to be sung by an actual human, some of the lyrics to this masterpiece go as follows:
这是Excel世界锦标赛
谁会赢？
这是Excel世界锦标赛
谁将进入电子表格箱？
这是泰坦之战
全国最好的键盘敲击者
他们都在为这一刻而训练
谁被困在功能沙里了？
打败鲍勃·迪伦。Excel世界锦标赛于2024年12月举行，虽然这不是第一次举办这项赛事，但这是第一次亲自举办，也是(到目前为止)最耀眼的一次。在拉斯维加斯电子竞技竞技场举行，12名决赛选手在蓬勃发展的播音员呼叫和疯狂的掌声中进入比赛，你几乎可以原谅你认为你偶然发现了某种摔跤盛会:直到竞争对手在发光的电脑前就座， 游戏开始了。
在每一轮比赛中，参赛者都要面对来自不同设计师的定制和高度复杂的Excel难题，然后同时开始解决它们，最慢的将被淘汰。早期的一轮是基于魔兽世界的场景，要求竞争对手设计一个跟踪20个角色及其统计数据的电子表格(为什么不自己尝试一下)。
The championships had a $5,000 top prize, the belt, and of course the office bragging rights. "Excel was always thought of as a back-office product," organiser Andrew Grigolyunovich told the New York Times. "[But] these people who are working, I don’t want to say boring jobs—but, you know, regular jobs—they could become stars."
Stars might seem a bit much, but that's because you're not sufficiently invested in Excel. "This is the Super Bowl for Excel nerds," said software developer Erik Oehm. "If Excel is the center of your universe, this is like hanging out with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant."
Financial consultant Diarmud Early was in fact announced as the "LeBron James of Excel" while Bryant was apparently actuary Andrew Ngai, a three-time champion whose unlikely nickname is The Annihilator. Ngai in fact looked on-track for his fourth success early on, before getting stuck on a particularly knotty problem that saw others catch up.
Excel competitions had existed previously but Grigolyunovich, who had competed himself, set up the Financial Modeling World Cup to run the Excel World Championship and other events. Grigolyunovich's instinct to amp-up the pageantry seemed popular among the competitors.
"I remember thinking 'Well, this is ridiculous, why do we have this?'” said financial consultant Michael Jarman about the entrance showmanship. "But it’s all in good fun. And if the other e-sports do it, we should too."
And "good fun" was definitely the vibe here. Competitors posed for selfies with the audience, joked about the friendly rivalries, and the crowd knew its role, providing dramatic "oohs" at especially tense spreadsheet-fiddling moments. "You’d never see this with Google Sheets," said Oehm. You’d never get this level of passion."
It is hard to judge the tone of this event. It is, on the one hand, a knowingly ironic celebration of a piece of software that most of us associate with offices and the not-fun bits of work, over the top with the razzle-dazzle. But on the other, and you see this in the enthusiasm of the audience and in the chat from those watching online, there is a genuinely unironic love of Excel, here. A celebratory atmosphere built around one of the most ubiquitous pieces of business software on the planet. A lot of people spend a lot of time in Excel and, whether you're being paid or not, you get attached to these things.
But there did have to be a winner. From an inauspicious beginning, Jarman led the pack in the final challenge. LeBron and Kobe had fallen off, and were desperately trying for the last-minute formula that could somehow turn things around. But as the seconds ticked down, Jarman stayed in front, and then it was over: Jarman jumped out of his seat, the audience roared, and soon enough he was holding his championship belt aloft as the room went wild.
最有趣的事情之一是，可以理解的是，评论员在试图解释竞争对手正在做什么时有点迷失:Excel并不完全是一项自然的观赏性运动，这当然是一点。决赛中有一个伟大的时刻，当屏幕上的一些东西发生变化，解说员只是说“不管他做了什么，都成功了！”到2025年Excel世界锦标赛时，也许这应该成为口号。
