Become an Excel Champion
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Become an Excel Champion

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Spreadsheet used in Excel course.

If you are thinking of taking some Excel courses to expand your skills, why stop there when you can become the global Excel champion? To get there, you’ll need to beat out Andrew Ngai, the two-time Excel world champion. Andrew isn’t just any Excel expert, he’s the master of creating spreadsheets that address complex business problems in competitions.

The Microsoft Excel World Championships which occurs each year in Las Vegas. This year’s competition was held at the HyperX Arena Las Vegas that is part of the Luxor Hotel. If you go, plan to watch Excel “athletes” who are on stage and have their computer screens presented for the audience to see as you find in competitive e-sports, with play-by-play from several Excel instructors and former Microsoft employees. If you plan to compete, bring your A-game, as participants have names such as “the annihilator” and “the LeBron James of Excel”, and “B-Money”.

It’s easy to see why everyone loves Excel because it’s used everywhere and it’s embedded in our culture. You’ll find Excel in music videos and in court cases where fraudsters used Excel, even while some companies have said that Excel hasn’t kept up with the needs of business because offline data is disconnected from other systems.

The Excel championship requires stamina from participants, as the contestants meet over three periods, like a hockey game, except each period here is 30-minutes in length. Like a tight competition at the ice rink, there is a live audience that can cheer and boo as they are excited, surprised, and amazed at the way data is shaped and formed across tables and sheets. 

There were 16 competitors in this years event, challengers in the live event, part of the Financial Modeling Word Cup, which you can watch online. 

The competition includes winners and losers, with those holding the lowest scores being eliminated as the match progresses. The finals included six problems that involved a fictitious construction and mining operation along with several bonus problems, with low scorpion competitors eliminated every few minutes. 

While you might just be starting to attend Excel courses or only learning now about competitive Excel, it has been around for ten years, when financial consultant out of Latvia, Andrew Grigolyunovich, started promoting Excel competitions online. 

The annihilator lived up to his name this year. The actuary by trade won the competition, handily beating the competition and walking away with an Excel champion belt, like a prize-fighter, and a $3,000 prize.

 

About the author

Christopher Smith is president of American Graphics Institute. He is the co-author of Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies and more than 10 other books on design and digital publishing. He served as publisher and editor of the Digital Classroom book series, which has sold more than one million books on topics relating to InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro and other Creative Cloud apps. At American Graphics Institute, he provides strategic technology consulting to marketing professionals, publishers designers, and large technology companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and HP. An expert on web analytics and digital marketing, he also delivers Google Analytics classes along with workshops on digital marketing topics. Christopher did his undergraduate studies the at the University of Minnesota, and then worked for Quark, Inc. prior to joining American Graphics Institute where he has worked for more than 20 years.