Teatime in Excel Country

 Some things are universally understood in Britain, but surprisingly unknown in the rest of the world. I once described Blue Peter to a friend as a teatime TV show, and he replied "Yeah, you're gonna have to translate that into American for me. What time do people drink tea in Britain?"

In the same kind of way, the UK Chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship organisation sprang into life at teatime (5pm, but this isn't some kind of official time when tea is taken) on Saturday, with the first of three online events leading up to an in-person final in London in September! The winner of which will get a trip to Las Vegas for the World Championship finals!

Check out the UK website here, and please do sign up for the remaining online competitions if you have any kind of interest in fun and friendly mind-gamey competition! It costs a mere £15, and you've got a good chance of being one of the 32 people who get to the final! And if you do, you get to hang out with me in September, because I was one of the first seven qualifiers to come out of Battle 1!

With 33 UK competitors having entered so far, your odds are pretty good of making the top 32, and I promise you it really is a lot of fun! The challenges here are generally less complex and more beginner-friendly than the ones in the world championship events, you can download a couple of sample cases for free from the website, and non-British people can compete just for the fun of it anyway, which I heartily recommend you do!

It's worth mentioning that I would have won this Battle if I hadn't missed out a decimal point. The puzzles in this challenge were all about London buses, with a lot of extra data to manipulate and use to answer the questions, which I did very nicely for the most part. I only slipped up on bonus question 5, which is a simple calculation...

I cleverly provided the correct percentage to increase the bus fare to £175 rather than £1.75, and failed to notice the blunder. In my defence, I'm from the north, and everyone knows everything is super-expensive in London, so it doesn't seem so implausible to me.

Seriously, sign up and take part! It's a great way to pass the time on a Saturday afternoon while you're drinking your tea, studying your double-decker bus timetables and otherwise excelling in popular British activities!