(Credit: René Ramos, Emily Forlini; Michael Jarmon; аska / Adobe Stock)
"Jarmy army, come on up to the stage!" an announcer booms into the mic.
Michael Jarman tears through the "hype tunnel" in Las Vegas' HyperX Arena like a football player at the Super Bowl. But he's not here for a physical battle; Jarman is going up against 12 of the best spreadsheet masters from around the world in the Excel World Championships.
He pumps his arms in the air and makes his way to a computer next to the other players. The stadium is decked out in green lights, Microsoft Excel's signature color, with rows of stadium seating stretched before it.
The group is vying for the top prize of $5,000 and an epic, wrestling-style championship belt. To get there, they'll have to take down Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai, who won the past three competitions, and others like Diarmuid Early, the "LeBron James of Excel."
Jarman was known as "the Excel guy" while at university in the United Kingdom. Now living in Canada, he works for a company called Operis, which manages complex infrastructure transactions with a "whole team of Excel guys," he tells us. Competitions like the Excel World Championships are a rare chance to show off hard-earned corporate skills in public.
In the US, you can catch the championships on sports channels like ESPN. "The fact I've been televised from a sports channel is just really funny," Jarman says. "It's awesome. All my friends at uni were rugby and football players, much sportier than me. And now it's like, 'Who's a televised sportsman now?' It's just very entertaining."
Excel has revolutionized the business world since its release in 1985. It now has over a billion users, though it faces growing competition from free, web-based alternatives like Google Sheets. Microsoft hopes to lure them back with AI, Business Insider reports, but that could put "the Excel guy" on the endangered species list. Why spend decades leveling up your Excel skills when ChatGPT or Copilot can write complex formulas in an instant?
Currently, a Copilot button in Excel produces a chat interface. You can tell it what you want to do with the data and ask for pre-written formulas. But it's only simple prompts and geared toward casual users who "never even type in a formula," Jarman says.
"I don't think Copilot is anywhere near [being] able to beat me or Andrew or anything like that," Jarman says. Before each round at the championship, Microsoft advertised Copilot by showing videos of people solving questions with it. The competitors, who are a tight-knit bunch, found this "amusing, because it was all the easy questions Copilot was answering," Jarman says.
"I was out there going, 'Well, yeah, but I could have done that in three seconds.' But at some point, if it continues getting better, which I think it will, and it can beat me or Andrew, then we're all out of a job," Jarman says.
So, You Want to Be an Excel Champ? Here Are the Rules
The competition runs for 40 minutes and begins by introducing the challenge. Last year's competition was designed by Excel masters David Fortin and Andrew Grigolyunovich. It was Warcraft-themed in honor of that game's 30th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft (WoW), made by Activision Blizzard and now owned by Microsoft.
"WoW is such an iconic game and it was a blast to design this," Fortin says. "We designed some unusual cases never used in Excel esports before."
Each competitor gets a spreadsheet containing multiple tabs and WoW-themed numbers to crunch. The goal is to progress a cohort of characters, such as warlocks, orcs, trolls, priests, and the undead, through the levels and beat the final boss. The characters have their own stats and skills, represented by numbers, which the Excel masters manipulate with complex modeling.
The player with the most points wins. Points go up on a public leaderboard as the competitors move through the levels. Five bonus questions are awarded to the first few players to get through each level. These are coveted points and necessary to win. Every five minutes, the player with the fewest number of points is eliminated from the battle; announcers tease "the spreadsheet madness that is coming up."
Let the Games Begin: Jarman vs. Ngai Showdown
Jarman took an early lead, putting up 100 points on the public leaderboard in the first few minutes. He and the other competitors furiously typed away on competition-provided machines (though they could bring their own keyboards). Forty minutes might not be enough time to complete the challenges—the question is who will get the furthest in the least amount of time.
"There are only four or five people who are good enough where on a good day they can win," Jarman says. "But there's always a little bit of luck of, you know, with the questions going your way, or just having a spark of insight and knowing how to solve them quickly."
The fact that Ngai has won the competition three times in a row is particularly impressive, but Jarman was hot on his heels in 2024. During the competition, the announcers switched between exclaiming, "Andrew's taken the lead!" and "Now Michael's back in the lead! Are we going to see the belt go from Australia to Canada?"
The camera panned to fans eagerly watching in the audience and recording with their phones. By the 20-minute mark, or halfway through, the two were tied at 705 points. Jarman pulled ahead again to 905 points with just three minutes left; Ngai was at 845. As the minutes ticked down, both competitors were stuck. They couldn't progress further in the challenges, and Ngai frantically manipulated cells and ran formulas as he tried to find a Hail Mary.
Finally, the clock hit 0:00, and Jarman leaped out of his chair, pumped his arms, and yelled a victorious "COME ON!" He smoothed his hair down as he released the stress and gave the other competitors a hug. He won in a "huge upset," as one fan put it.
He received a giant check for $5,000 and that glorious wrestling belt. "I'm over the moon," he told the announcer in a post-game interview. "Andrew has been a very formidable competitor, [with] three wins, so he's always been the problem. But I finally managed to prevail. I'm really happy."
Microsoft Excel World Championship 2025
Want to face off against Jarman and the rest of the crew this year? Or just watch the action? An initial qualifying round is set for Sept. 27, 2025, with playoffs in October and the finals in Las Vegas on Dec. 2-3. Here's what you need to know.