Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title

It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?

I enjoy the idea, and love watching it grow.

Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.

When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.

It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.

It used to be financial modeling but they realized they’d get more attention with the esports audience this way.

It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.

> Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.

Huh, interesting. I thought I’d been working remote so long that offices had done this to make people more excited for work.

Glad to see not only our financial infrastructure relies on wealth management agents’ skills at writing formulas, but our army also relies on our general commanders’ skills in Excel.

Funnily Excel is the tool of adults born in 1980; The next generation will only know Canva, so I guess we’ll have great infographics about battle fronts.

Spreadsheets aren't going anywhere, Google Sheets is widely used by 20-something people at my work.

Was it truly "in excel" or was it also using powershell?

It was entirely in Excel, no powershell.