Spreadsheet Superstars
June 13, 2024 at 05:42PM“Go to Las Vegas to compete in the Excel World Championship” is the sort of assignment any tech-adjacent journalist dreams of getting. But few could pull it off the way David Pierce does for The Verge—with descriptive reporting, humor, and more than a little insight into how a spreadsheet program became arguably the most important piece of software since the dawn of personal computing. Add in some of the best design I’ve seen in an online feature this year, and you’ve got a winner.
Rose says go, and the most problematic thing about competitive Excel becomes blindingly obvious to me once again: it is damn near impossible to figure out what’s going on. All eight players are moving so fast and doing so many things with keyboard shortcuts and formulas that there’s practically no way to see what they’re doing until it’s already done. What’s happening around me looks like a sport, it’s lit like a sport, and the anxiety levels suggest aggressive competition, but even the other competitors in the room can barely keep up. They’re squinting at the screens in front of each workstation, trying to decipher each move. Really, they’re mostly just waiting for the score to update.
In the commentary booth, du Soleil and Acampora are doing their best to keep up and explain the maneuvers, but watching eight spreadsheet whizzes simultaneously requires multitasking brainpower I’m not sure any human can attain. And if you can figure out what =SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””) means in the few seconds it’s shown onscreen, well, you should come to Vegas next year.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/06/13/spreadsheet-superstars/
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