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.”

President-elect Donald J. Trump is planning a string of executive orders during his first days in office, including one to strip job protections from career civil servants, his top policy adviser told Republican members of Congress on Sunday, according to two people briefed on the matter.

In a phone call with a few dozen Republicans on Sunday, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s incoming homeland security adviser and deputy White House chief of staff overseeing policy, laid out the broad strokes of what Mr. Trump is planning on energy, immigration and federal workers. The call was reported earlier by the website Punchbowl and confirmed by two people briefed on the conversation.

A Trump spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Mr. Trump has indicated he plans to sign roughly 100 executive orders in the initial days of his presidency, with a number coming within hours of his being sworn in on Monday.

Among them are substantial actions to reshape the federal bureaucracy’s workplace rules, which are in line with various promises that Mr. Trump made on the campaign trail.

Mr. Miller described, while providing little detail, executive orders to undo actions taken by President Biden to institute “diversity, equity and inclusion” measures in federal agencies, and to roll back protections for transgender people receiving some government services.

Mr. Trump also plans to reinstate an order he issued during his first term to create a new category of federal workers, known as Schedule F, that would lack the same job protections enjoyed by career civil servants, who are supposed to be hired according to merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. That would allow his administration to shift large numbers of federal workers into a new status over which it could keep a much tighter rein, including the ability to hire and fire them more easily. The order is significant as Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller have a deep hostility toward large portions of the federal bureaucracy, which the president-elect often derisively calls the “deep state.”

Mr. Trump is also planning a string of orders related to energy policy, much of which arise from pledges to encourage offshore drilling and end the electric vehicle tax credit, as well as stop spending on Mr. Biden’s climate policies.

And on immigration, as The New York Times has reported, Mr. Trump is planning to designate drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations”; declare a border emergency to allow him to go around Congress and surge money and potentially military resources to the border; and declare a public health emergency to essentially seal the border as the administration did during the coronavirus pandemic. He also is expected to curtail asylum grants and step up detentions and deportations.

Mr. Miller has been leading the executive order process throughout the transition, aiming for as much secrecy as possible and only opening the aperture internally as time went on so that various agency heads could see some of the work. He has been using a team of lawyers to vet them.

At his rally at the Capital One Arena on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Trump told the crowd that the executive orders would make them “extremely happy.”

He said he had beaten back efforts by some advisers to delay his Day 1 executive orders, saying he wants to give the country a massive first day and first week in office filled with activity.

Mr. Trump also said he plans to quickly release the classified files related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

And he previewed coming clemency grants for people convicted in connection with the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. He referred to them as “hostages,” as he has throughout the campaign.