Brackets

 Or 'pairings' as we call them in the kind of competitions I usually enter. But people are throwing brackets at me today! Two different sets of them!

Firstly, it turns out a sufficient number of entrants to the Microsoft Excel World Championship WERE equally or more stupid than me, and I scraped through to the first round proper! So tune in (metaphorically speaking - my match probably won't be streamed live) on October 29th, at 5pm British time!

Here's my quarter of the draw:

I'm playing one Ben Rotblatt, of the USA - there are a good number of Bens among the 128 qualifiers, actually. It must be an Excellent kind of name. He skipped the 'very hard' one of the five tasks, and had a mistake in the fifth. I think it could be a close contest, and I'm going to have to do some serious training!

And then if I win this one, I'm up against Justin Merson of Canada, probably. He did all five tasks perfectly, so he's obviously good at Excel. I might struggle to make it to the last 32. But I can see this is going to become my new "thing"! Competitive Excel! What a brilliant idea!

Meanwhile, my old "thing" is still doing its thing. The next Slam in Memory League is the African-European Open (that's the one in the most convenient time zone for Africa and Europe), and I'm only 17th on the list of seeds, so it'll take two rounds of qualifying to get to the finals...

Hopefully I can get through a match against the winner of round one (they're both beginners, but you have to watch beginners; they might get very good very quickly), and then I'll have to beat Ewelina (very difficult!) if I'm to get to face Andrea (entirely impossible!) in the first round proper on November 5th.

It's all good fun, if you like that kind of thing!

Competitive spreadsheeting

 Did you know there's such a thing as the Microsoft Excel World Championship? I only found out that it exists just recently, but it's been going for a few years now, as an offshoot of the Financial Modelling World Cup (which I also didn't know existed). Someone should tell me things like this! You know I'm downright weird about playing with Excel spreadsheets for all kinds of unlikely purposes!

Anyway, last night was the qualifying round for this year's competition, and it was brilliant. I think they're probably going to make the task free to download at some point in the future (previous ones are already available - check them out!), and I'd hate to spoil it, but it was divided into five tasks, requiring you to create complicated Excel formulas to find the right answers. It's hugely enjoyable, if you're the kind of person who likes that kind of thing.

I did four of the five tasks in the 60 minutes allotted time, realised I wasn't going to have time to do the last, so submitted the file with five minutes or so remaining (time counts as a tiebreaker). Then I went on to have a go at task number five, looked back over the previous ones and realised I'd made a boneheaded mistake in the second and highest-scoring task - rather than copying the answers into the boxes on the front page to get the total of all twenty sub-tasks, I just summed the whole lot I'd worked out on the other tab, including the example (which had an answer of 1). So the answer I cheerfully typed in for the most valuable question on the whole challenge was 8714 instead of the correct 8713.

If I was at work, I'd give myself the sack for that kind of carelessness. As it is, and since I'm unlikely to qualify for the finals unless everyone else in the qualifiers was equally stupid, I see it as a good learning experience, and I'll practice some more for next year's event! And I'll have a lot of fun watching the grand finals over the next couple of months!