If you follow my Facebook, you might have seen me boasting yesterday that I've qualified for the Microsoft Excel World Championship 2023 in the monthly competition. In fairness, I was very chuffed to achieve that, although I do think I was perhaps a bit lucky, as there are plenty of people out there who are rather a lot better than me at these things.
But for the benefit of Hua Wei, Francis and anyone else who wondered exactly what these competitions involve, it goes a bit like this - each competition has a theme, gives you a lot of data, and your job is to answer as many of the questions as possible in 30 minutes, using Excel formulas and quite a lot of creative thinking.
The theme this time was flights, and we get this data on our spreadsheets:
Each competition has five levels, and three bonus questions that can be answered at any time. They start with the very easy, like this one:
... which obviously can be done with a simple lookup formula or two (the first three answers in each level have to be entered on the competition website, along with the total or code word generated from all the other answers by a formula in the bottom code).
By the time we get to level 3, it's got a lot more complicated:
This fun little task involved a bit of text-to-columns to separate the forty flights in each line, lookups to the master table and a quickly-cobbled-together list of numbers and the next number that contains a 7, and a few simple formulas. I think a lot of competitors tried to be too clever with this one, and my more basic approach got me through it.
Levels 4 and 5 got more complicated than that, and nobody came close to finishing them all in the 30 minutes. So that's how the whole Excel Esports thing works! I urge you to go to the website, download some of the sample cases, and join in the next online battle, on May 26th!
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