Ireland’s Diarmuid Early has won the Excel World Championship. Readers of a certain age may be disappointed to learn he has never used Lotus 1-2-3.
Early beat last year’s winner, Andrew Ngai of Australia, in a Las Vegas final livestreamed by ESPN. The show was vaguely reminiscent of a wrestling event, with a half-time show featuring an “Export to Excel” musical number. However, rather than oiled wrestlers, there were Excel experts, aiming to work their way through spreadsheet puzzles until a final winner could be crowned, awarded a $5,000 prize, a trophy, and a winner’s wrestling-style belt.
Diarmuid Early (pic: Datarails)
The winner of the UK Excel Championship, Ha Dang, finished fifth in a field of twelve competitors.
Early, who has a PhD in computer science and is the founder of Early Days Consulting in New York, told The Register that his training involved “trying as many of these kinds of problems as I can get my hands on.”
Early is no stranger to the competitive Excel world and has won the Financial Modeling World Cup in the past. The Register asked him if anything in particular stood out this time around. Early said: “One case that stood out was the quarterfinal, by Harry Gross, where we had to solve a jigsaw using Excel.
“It was a great case for a live audience, because it revealed a famous painting if you placed the answers correctly. The audience reaction when people solved the puzzles and revealed the pictures up on the big screen was great.”
The event is a showcase for both Microsoft’s spreadsheet and the skills of individuals who can use it to solve tricky problems. However, in a very enthusiastic press release from Jonathan Marciano, VP of Brand and Communications at Datarails, a sponsor of the half-time show, it was noted that, as tensions rose, “predictably, Excel crashed.”
Hopefully, the Excel team was taking notes. Microsoft extended congratulations on behalf of the product team. CEO Satya Nadella posted: “Huge congrats, Diarmuid! Would love to have you come to Redmond, meet the team, and learn from your Excel skills!”
We asked Early what he made of Microsoft’s direction of travel with Excel and its habit of inserting AI into its wares (Excel, for example, recently gained a COPILOT function).
Early was enthusiastic. “I think it’s a good direction of travel – over time, it will make it easier for a much wider group of people to get basic things done in Excel,” he said.
“But we’re also at a stage where AI can often be confidently wrong, so you still need to check your results!”
Wise words.
Early started using Excel in 2008 at Boston Consulting Group in London. “I use Sheets sometimes for some odds and ends, but I do any serious modeling in Excel,” he said.
Excel first emerged in 1985, although it didn’t reach the Intel platform until 1987. The dominant spreadsheet of the 1980s was Lotus 1-2-3, but in the 1990s, Excel overtook it in popularity. By 2013, Lotus 1-2-3 was quietly killed off by IBM, which had acquired Lotus.
We asked Early if there had been any dalliances in the past with the Lotus spreadsheet. The answer is no. “I’ve never used Lotus 1-2-3.” ®
