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Diarmuid Early has been crowned the champion of the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship, triumphing over 23 other top competitors during the live LAN finals held at the HyperX Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada
The three-day event, which marks the culmination of the Excel Esports season that began in January, gathered the world's elite spreadsheet specialists. The finals saw 24 qualified players — narrowed down from an initial pool of 150 in the online phase — tackle a complex, origami-inspired case. This final challenge required competitors to leverage their mastery of the software to answer 130 questions across seven levels.
The intense final round operated on an elimination basis, with the lowest-scoring player knocked out every five minutes until only six remained. After an hour of high-pressure problem-solving, Early secured the top spot with a score of 1,250 points. He finished comfortably ahead of runner-up and three-time world champion Andrew Ngai, beating him by a margin of over 300 points.
As the first person to correctly solve all problems, Early took home the USD5,000 (RM20,562) grand prize and the coveted themed championship belt.
So, what exactly is competitive Excel?
For roughly two decades, competitive Excel has challenged participants to think logically and creatively to develop scalable, efficient solutions to complex problems.
While historically focused on pure mathematics, the competition has evolved to include a diverse range of problem-solving tasks, such as navigating mazes, deciphering poker hands, or sorting historical figures like kings and queens by their battles.
In a typical match, competitors are presented with a storyline-driven "case" containing jumbled data and scenarios. The objective is to create a general solution that can sort and answer the case questions as quickly as possible.
Here's how a round works:
All competitors receive the same Excel file simultaneously. Players then have a strict 30-minute window to solve as many problems as they can.
The file contains seven levels of questions that increase in difficulty, along with several bonus questions. Each correct answer awards a set number of points, with harder questions yielding higher rewards.
The competitor with the most points at the end of the round wins. In the event of a tie, victory goes to the player who completed the tasks fastest.
The application has evolved thanks to the esports series
Microsoft Product Manager Joe McDaid acknowledged that the competition has significantly "enhanced" the software, compelling it to evolve. He explained that the complex queries posed during the event push the program to its absolute limits, inspiring developers to continuously improve it with new features such as Copilot.
"Some of the problems they've been solving 10 years ago, many of those problems that were really difficult to solve are now quite easy to solve in the modern application," he noted.
Expressing his excitement, he admitted that Microsoft had "never envisaged it would grow into anything like this".
