There was a moment in the semi-final of the Microsoft Excel world championship when Andrew “the Annihilator” Ngai thought he had been eliminated.
With the clock ticking and the Las Vegas audience on the edge of their seats, the two-time spreadsheet world champion started “furiously checking” his answers. Had he made a rounding error? Were his decimal places off?
Stressed and doubting himself, Ngai decided it wasn’t his night. Michael “the Jarman Army” Jarman from the UK or Peter Sharl – no nickname – from the US looked set to win. But Ngai had no reason to worry.
“For some unknown reason there was a mismatch between the scoresheet and the live stream,” he tells Guardian Australia from the US. “No one really knows why but it got out of sync.”
The glitch was fixed, the scoreboard corrected and the 36-year-old from Sydney stormed to victory on Saturday night, becoming the triple world champion in data processing.
“You didn’t just succeed – you Exceled,” Microsoft told Ngai via its Instagram feed. On X, one fan said the victory “will go down as a historical American sports moment on par with Babe Ruth calling his home run shot in the 1932 World Series”.
Microsoft Excel is officially an esport. In each round, eight players are given a big ream of data, plus a set of instructions. Contestants need to create formulas and subsets to process the data, working against the clock to solve stages of the case and earn bonus points. Every seven and a half minutes the lowest scorer is eliminated.
“We have to decide, do we go for the bonus questions and get them in before others, or do you solve levels and progress further along?” says Ngai, who was given his nickname by “another Excel guru” on TikTok.
When he’s not inputting cell values on a stage in Vegas, Ngai is a senior actuary in central Sydney. He says he is “not bad” at maths – by which he means he came top in the state of New South Wales in his year 12 maths exams. Since graduating from university, where he was awarded a degree in actuarial studies, he has used Excel every day for work.
He started competing in the Excel championships in 2018 after hearing about the series. He won the title in 2019 when the competition was still in its infancy. Since then, the game has evolved.
With entertainment in mind, the organisers shortened rounds to 30 minutes and livened up the cases. For example, Ngai had to calculate the market value of a fleet of spaceships using real data from the video game Eve Online – with the action televised live on ESPN.
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The drama on the night made his win feel “crazy”, he says – not unlike last year, when he beat Brittany Deaton by just five points. If the game format sounds surprisingly gripping, it is also helped by the setting. Luxor hotel’s HyperX esports arena is complete with big screens, gaming seats and two enthusiastic commentators. Alongside the $15,000 prize money is an oversized boxing-style leather belt.
Saturday’s 16 semi-finalists came from all over the world, including Poland, Brazil, Canada, Australia, the US and the UK. The community is tight-knit and the championships coincided with the Active Cell conference, where fans can join Excel masterclasses and finesse their skills in the spreadsheet’s new functions. Nowadays the spreadsheet is bulging with action, with computer programming and links to other software built into its design.
If there’s one thing Ngai has learned from his three wins it is that sometimes simple is best.
“The nature of this competition is you don’t necessarily have to know everything about Excel to be successful,” he says. “Keeping it simple can be quite effective.”
But the last word goes to Brandon Moyer, who was eliminated in the final. In his post-game interview, the US competitor thanked his wife, who “never made fun of me, even once, for competing in the Microsoft Excel world championship”.