A bit more Excel

 I've done nothing but post about Excel championships here this month, and I'm very sorry if it's bored you. But you shouldn't be reading my blog if you're bored by competitive spreadsheeting, so it's more your fault than mine. I'll go back to writing strange things about comics and cartoons as soon as I can, and I'll go into alarming length about how much I love Simon the chipmunk.

But today was the draw for the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship, and I have to say, this is kind of an ideal batch of potential opponents for me!

Paulo Guerra didn't quite get a high enough score in the qualification round at the weekend, but got a wildcard entry. My potential opponents in round 2, Ashleigh Roberts and Hunter Wylie, both qualified through the qualification round, but with lower scores than my just-for-fun total. All three of them competed in the Road to Las Vegas competitions this year, and Hunter got a higher score than me in the first one, but I was better than all three of them in all eight of the others.

So that takes care of the fear of being paired against someone who's unstoppably better than me. We still have the fear of getting a task that my opponent knows how to do better than I do, but the chances of that seem rather smaller. All three of my rivals, I can see from the score breakdown in the qualification round, did all the questions that I know how to do with Excel, and didn't attempt the ones I did by old-fashioned manual calculation because using Excel for them seemed too complicated.

This seems to suggest that if (or when) I lose these matches, it will be because of my own stupidity - which is somehow better than losing to someone who's just so manifestly better than me that I was always going to lose anyway. So really, thanks to this draw, overconfidence is going to be my worst enemy.

And if I get through to the last 64, there's a fair chance I'd be up against Lorenzo Foti, who is one of the seeds who I might almost possibly have a chance of beating on a very good day. Though he usually beats me without too much difficulty. All in all, though, a favourable draw!

I'll try to think of something else to write about until the championship starts on October 11th.