News
Is Microsoft Excel the Next Big E-Sport?
Like soccer players taking the field in a giant stadium, the 12 finalists ran through a glowing “hype tunnel,” some wearing jerseys with sponsorship logos. As an announcer bellowed introductions and cameras captured their every move, they approached a neon-lit stage to raucous cheers.
Then the men sat down at desktop computers, opened their Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and began to type.
Excel, a program that does complex math on a human’s behalf, is often associated, rightly, with corporate drudgery. But last month, in a Las Vegas e-sports arena that typically hosts Fortnite and League of Legends tournaments, finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream.
Organizers call the event the Microsoft Excel World Championship. “Yes, it is a thing,” the official website says.
At stake was a $5,000 prize, a wrestling-style championship belt and the title of world’s best spreadsheeter. But the organizer, Andrew Grigolyunovich, is dreaming bigger. He hopes to turn competitive Excel into a popular e-sport where pros compete for million-dollar prizes and big-league glory.
“Excel was always thought of as a back-office product,” said Mr. Grigolyunovich, a Sudoku champion from Latvia. But in Vegas, “these people who are working, I don’t want to say boring jobs — but, you know, regular jobs — they could become stars.”
If that seems too ambitious, we’d like to introduce you to Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco, who watched the action from the front row.
“This is the Super Bowl for Excel nerds,” Mr. Oehm said. “If Excel is the center of your universe, this is like hanging out with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.”
The “LeBron James of Excel,” as he was introduced in Vegas, was Diarmuid Early, 39, an Irish financial consultant who lives in New York, who entered the arena in jeans, sandals and a jersey patterned to resemble abdominal muscles. The Kobe Bryant was Andrew Ngai, 37, a soft-spoken actuary from Australia known as the Annihilator, who began the world championship as its reigning three-time champion.
“We’re friends — for now,” Mr. Early joked as they posed for a photo. But his anxiety was palpable.
“I probably take it too seriously,” he said. “I’m very invested in it.”
The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs. If that sounds unfathomably complicated, it was: The players were handed a seven-page instruction booklet.
To prepare, Mr. Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. Mr. Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of “focus music.”
After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — “Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!” — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: “=CountChar(Lower(D5),”W”)” allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter “W” appeared in a spreadsheet.
The aim was to score as many points as possible while staying ahead of rolling eliminations. As cascading answers filled Excel columns, Mr. Ngai took a significant lead, to audible gasps. Then he got stuck on a problem, as did Mr. Early. Mr. Jarman pulled ahead as the two front-runners frantically tried to troubleshoot.
“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” Mr. Oehm chanted.
‘Well, this is ridiculous.’
The first electronic spreadsheet was VisiCalc, an “electronic blackboard” that automated pen-and-paper calculations. Microsoft introduced Excel in 1985. The company says its suite of office software, which includes Excel, has more than 400 million users. (Google has said that more than three billion people use its free suite of products, including Gmail and a spreadsheet program called Sheets.)
Part of the appeal, and the intimidation factor, of spreadsheets is their undefined scope. Excel can be a dating organizer or a tool for collating a country’s coronavirus caseload, for example.
Speaking in almost philosophical terms, Bob Frankston, a founder of VisiCalc, said that people who treat Excel merely as a finance tool ignore its vast potential. “They don’t realize it’s a mirror” of their minds, he said. “The financial planning tool they’re seeing is in their head.”
But for millions of people, it’s still just a tool for accomplishing the tasks their corporate overseers assign to them. It may say something about our times that the instruments of our servitude are also the basis of our games.
The first Excel competition, ModelOff, started in 2012. But ModelOff, which featured financial problems that took hours to solve, was not designed with thrills in mind.
When ModelOff was discontinued after seven years, Mr. Grigolyunovich, a former competitor, created the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization that runs the Excel championship and other events. The championship — which has several corporate sponsors, including Microsoft — was held in person for the first time last year. He said its shortened rounds, eliminations, commentators and pregame “hype tunnel” were designed to raise tension and lure spectators.
“I remember thinking ‘Well, this is ridiculous, why do we have this?’” Mr. Jarman, 30, a British financial consultant who lives in Toronto, said of the tunnel. “But it’s all in good fun. And if the other e-sports do it, we should too.”
Mr. Grigolyunovich said his vision for future tournaments includes more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize for the winner. For now, many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN’s annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships.
Reluctant rivals
The competitors in Vegas said winning requires not just Excel-know how, but also problem-solving acumen, composure under pressure and intuition — or luck. Add the frisson of a live audience, they say, and the competition starts to resemble a sport in its unpredictability, if not physicality.
They seemed less interested in Mr. Grigolyunovich’s visions of fame and fortune, and more focused on adjusting to the transformation of their staid, niche hobby into a televised spectacle. Mostly they had come to geek out with fellow Excel buffs. Between rounds, they attended spreadsheeting workshops and added each other on LinkedIn.
More rivalries could help to build some excitement, several contestants said — but they were too polite, and on too friendly terms with one another, to initiate any.
“Basically everything that they do to make it more fun for viewers makes it more traumatic for competitors,” Mr. Early said.
There was a bit of celebrity stardust in the air, though, as Mr. Early and the Mr. Ngai, the LeBron and Kobe of Excel, fielded a stream of selfie requests.
“This guy is amazing,” one quarterfinalist, Joy Hezekiah Andriamalala, a finance student from Madagascar, said to a reporter after snapping a photo with Mr. Ngai. “Do you know him? Personally?”
Mr. Ngai, who appeared resigned to the possibility of losing his championship streak, admitted that being a minor celebrity for a few days was “pretty cool.” He said he had started to treat competitive Excel more like a sport than a hobby, setting aside more time to practice.
Onstage, the front-runners tried to prevent Mr. Jarman from running away with the championship belt. Mr. Early won a semifinal round by turning screens of mazes made of colored cells and emojis into numbers. In the finals, Mr. Ngai tried a Hail Mary: filling his remaining cells with random numbers.
As the clocked ticked down to zero, Mr. Jarman turned to stare at the leaderboard.
“Ten seconds, is anything going to happen?” a commentator, Oz du Soleil, shouted. Nothing did.
Mr. Jarman leaped out of his seat and threw his hands in the air, his face gleaming with sweat. The audience erupted. “Look at that! Look at that!” Mr. du Soleil yelled.
Mr. Jarman held the championship belt aloft as someone dumped glitter on his head. Mr. Oehm let out a breath he had been holding.
“You’d never see this with Google Sheets,” he said. “You’d never get this level of passion.”
Three San Francisco couples set out Monday for their annual road trip to Ashland, Ore., for the town’s famous Shakespeare festival. They drove separately and planned to meet at 6:30 p.m. on the terrace of their favorite Japanese restaurant there.
They had booked a table for six, but only four showed up for dinner.
Judith and Wylie Sheldon were found dead in their running car on the side of the road to Oregon, shocking their friends and family and leaving a hole in San Francisco’s arts and film world.
Ms. Sheldon, 84, was the daughter of William Wyler — who won three Oscars for best director — and chaired the board of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Mr. Sheldon, 86, was a prominent lawyer.
David Smith, who had befriended the couple more than 40 years ago, said in an interview that he and the others at the dinner table had grown nervous as time ticked on and their friends did not answer repeated calls to their cellphones. They learned they had not checked into their hotel either.
The friends eventually learned from one of the couple’s sons that the California Highway Patrol had found the couple at 5:46 p.m., both dead inside their running Jeep Compass. It was parked on the side of Interstate 5, north of Redding, Calif., more than 100 miles from their destination, the authorities said. Ms. Sheldon was driving, while Mr. Sheldon was in the passenger seat, according to the authorities.
The Redding area on Monday was under an extreme heat warning issued by the National Weather Service. Temperatures reached 109 degrees, according to the Weather Service.
Mr. Smith said he learned from the son that the couple had been found without any water or other liquids in the car. The fan was on high, but the air conditioning was not working, meaning they might have been blasted with hot air, Mr. Smith said. The windows were rolled down. The car had plenty of gas, and there were no signs of mechanical failure or foul play, Mr. Smith said the son told him.
“They didn’t crash. They stopped. They both just died there,” Mr. Smith said. “The entire thing is so bizarre. We’re still in a state of shock.”
The circumstances and cause of the couple’s death is under investigation but “appears to be medically related,” the Highway Patrol said in a statement.
Whether the heat contributed to the couple’s death “may be determined” by an autopsy, a spokesman for the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office said, adding that one had not been scheduled yet and could take several weeks to complete.
“We’ll just have to see,” the spokesman, Tim Mapes, said.
The Sheldons met at Stanford University and had two sons. They lived in a large home in San Francisco’s upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood that had views of the bay from the front and a garden out back.
They hosted many parties there on behalf of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and sometimes let revelers pose for photos with Mr. Wyler’s Oscar statuettes. Ms. Sheldon fell in love with silent movies after first seeing those created by her father — before his better known blockbusters like “Ben-Hur” and “Roman Holiday” — only about 30 years ago, said Anita Monga, artistic director of the festival.
Stacey Wisnia, the festival’s executive director, said the couple was generous, delightful and unassuming.
Back in Ashland, Ore., Mr. Smith said the four remaining friends had distracted themselves from their grief by attending plays, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Come From Away.” They were able to give away their friends’ tickets.
Ms. Monga had last seen Ms. Sheldon just last month at the film festival, which was held at the newly remade Castro Theater.
“This is such a shock,” Ms. Monga said of the deaths. “Also because it’s still a mystery.”
Luigi Mangione appears for a pretrial hearing at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, June 17, 2026.
Angelina Katsanis/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Angelina Katsanis/AP
New York — In a dramatic reversal, Luigi Mangione’s legal team on Thursday backed away from a plan to use a psychiatric defense when his case goes to trial in state court in September. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to murdering health insurance CEO Brian Thompson in 2024 on a Manhattan street.
At a hearing only a day earlier before state Judge Gregory Carro, Mangione’s attorneys confirmed that Mangione had been undergoing psychiatric evaluation. They signaled that his defense would be based at least in part on the argument that Mangione was experiencing “extreme emotional disturbance.”
But in a one-line letter sent to Carro on Thursday, Mangione’s team said that “at this time” they no longer intend to introduce psychiatric evidence during the trial. It’s unclear what sparked the shift. Mangione’s team didn’t respond to NPR’s request for comment.
Former Manhattan prosecutor and legal analyst Gary Galperin told NPR it was a “stunning reversal” for Mangione to withdraw from the psychiatric defense. “One can only speculate at this point as to the reasons,” he said.
“What remains, of course, at this point is the question of what defense they will pursue at trial,” he added.
This maneuver came after Carro ordered Mangione’s attorneys to quickly share psychiatric information with prosecutors.
“They need to know what the malady is that this defendant suffers and how that triggered extreme emotional distress,” he said, during Wednesday’s hearing. “I’m not going to let you surprise people on the eve of trial. Get it done.”
Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Joel Seidemann repeatedly complained that Mangione’s team was “stonewalling” the prosecution by withholding medical information about his psychiatric state. “We have gotten nothing,” Seidemann said.
Mangione’s lead attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo denied her team was delaying the court process or improperly withholding information.
But legal analyst Richard Schoenstein says by withdrawing the psychiatric defense, Mangione’s team “is avoiding the court deadline to produce its psychiatric evidence.”
According to Schoenstein, this latest move “does not entirely foreclose” Mangione’s team from returning to some form of psychiatric argument during the trial, but he added that such a defense would now be far more difficult.
Mangione’s case has drawn worldwide attention. Legal experts say the 28-eight-year old has drawn an unusual level of public support because of his criticism of the health insurance industry. Thompson, a father of two, was CEO of UnitedHealthcare at the time of his murder.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Carro also indicated that a tranche of court documents would be made public that apparently relate to Mangione’s potential psychiatric defense. On Thursday, Carro reversed course.
In a signed order, he said that because Mangione will no longer present psychiatric evidence, “the court’s previous order sealing certain transcripts, emails, and documents, remains in effect.”
Mangione’s state trial is scheduled to begin in early September, with a federal trial expected to take place later.
The museums, designed by conservative nonprofits and Trump appointees, tell the story of early America, from colonization to revolution. The one exhibition looking beyond the early years is the “Wall of American Heroes.” It is a list of 51 people, chosen to illustrate 250 years of American history.
A White House spokesman said they were “individuals who shaped this nation’s history, culture and spirit across generations.”
The people pictured on this national honor roll — and the people left out — help illustrate what this administration sees as the highlights of American history.
Amid the administration’s efforts to reshape the nation’s relationship with its past, Trump appointees heavily weighted the list toward a single era of American history — and a few specific kinds of hero.
The other exhibitions in the Freedom Trucks were crafted by a pair of conservative nonprofits, PragerU and Hillsdale College. But the “Wall of American Heroes” was created by Freedom 250, a nonprofit effort whose leaders were chosen by President Trump and that was created to lead the planning of celebrations of the nation’s 250th birthday, overshadowing a bipartisan congressional commission.
A spokeswoman for Freedom 250 said Mr. Trump was not directly involved in the selection of those featured.
But the list clearly tracks Mr. Trump’s own lifetime and the heroes of the conservative political movement.
The wall’s tilt toward heroes of the baby boomer generation, for instance, extends beyond Hollywood stars and musicians. Of the four religious leaders on the list, two — Archbishop Fulton Sheen and the Rev. Billy Graham — also appeared on TV regularly in the 1950s and 1960s. The only painter on the list is Norman Rockwell, known for his idealized depictions of American life in that period.
By contrast, there is only a handful of figures from the first decades of American independence.
“That’s a disservice, if your intention is to present the last 250 years,” said Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association. “Because all of the people on this list are building on the work and struggles and progress that was made by the people in the 150 years prior.”
The “Wall of American Heroes” was inspired by a similar display in a traveling museum created by the State of Virginia. But Virginia’s display celebrates little-known historical figures.
Mr. Trump’s, by and large, celebrates people who are already well-known — and, often, people who were famous in their own time. For example, it praises P.T. Barnum, a circus impresario who used hoaxes and freak shows to draw crowds. The wall calls him an “icon of American sensationalism.”
The spokeswoman for Freedom 250 said that many of the names on the wall were drawn from a list of 250 people that Mr. Trump wants to include in a “Garden of American Heroes” in Washington.
The spokeswoman declined to say what criteria were used to narrow down the list.
The only president whose name appears on the wall — not on the list of heroes, but alongside his quotation — is Mr. Trump himself.
Explore the Wall of Heroes
Navigate the display by dragging from side to side.
-
Missouri12 seconds agoWhat’s closed on Juneteenth in Missouri? Check trash, libraries, banks
-
Montana7 minutes agoYour guide to local sports events, plus what’s on TV for June 19
-
Nebraska10 minutes agoNebraska’s governor doesn’t carry a state-issued phone. Critics call it an abuse of state disclosure laws. – Flatwater Free Press
-
Nevada15 minutes agoConservation groups oppose potential sale of federal lands highlighted in land mapping tool
-
New Hampshire22 minutes agoPortsmouth Pride 2026 is a protest and a celebration
-
New Jersey25 minutes agoHistorical marker recognizing Lawnside, New Jersey, to be unveiled Friday
-
New Mexico30 minutes agoEight Black New Mexican artists explore the concept of land through art
-
North Carolina37 minutes ago
NC ranks 9th nationally in business using AI
