Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title (bbc.com)
224 points by 1659447091 12 hours ago
mndgs 9 hours ago
Watch this, where he goes through the questions and explains how he did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mx_xhiIRpw
I'm pretty good with Excel, my main tool at the job for over 20 years. I understand how he did it, but it's just really humbling...
I still think quality of what you do with Excel (idea) is more important than how you do it (skill).
mmooss 7 hours ago
My best Excel trick, which reveals how little I know, and yet Early [0] doesn't use it (or maybe doesn't need it, but that's hard to believe):
1. You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
2. You can insert arbitrary[*] newlines in an Excel formula
Combining those, you can turn the absurd default format of single-line-of-code functions into something readable and manageable. Here's a simple one from a spreadsheet I have open:
=INDEX(
$C$17:$S$24,
MATCH(A6,$A$17:$A$24,0),
MATCH(C6,$C$15:$S$15,0)
)
[0] Early shows how it was done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340638
[*] I think you can do it anywhere but I haven't tested anything crazy; mostly I just use them between expressions.
Terr_ 5 hours ago
> You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line
For folks on LibreOffice (currently v24.2):
* There's an downward-pointing "expand" triangle to the far-right of the formula input line.
* That button toggles the formula input area between 1-line vs 6-lines with scrolling.
* Newlines can inserted by shift-enter.
* If there are additional formula lines lines outside the viewable line(s), then a dashed line on the relevant border will be shown. (Plus the regular scrollbar, in expanded mode.)
mmooss 5 hours ago
Terr_'s comment reminds me and I'm too late to edit the parent: In Excel's formula bar/field, insert newlines by pressing Alt+Enter.
buybackoff 11 hours ago
I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.
two-sandwich 12 hours ago
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.
medell 11 hours ago
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.
paulcole 6 hours ago
> 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.
stackghost 11 hours ago
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.
eastbound 37 minutes ago
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.
3eb7988a1663 5 hours ago
Can anyone find the actual challenge files? Not that I would be competitive at all, but the description of last year's World of Warcraft themed one is interesting, and I want to walk through it.
abra0 3 hours ago
Here: https://excel-esports.com/product/world-of-warcraft-mewc-202...
You're supposed to do a $0 checkout for some reason and then download them
zkmon 15 minutes ago
So BBC is quickly turning into an AI slop lake. The article text is stretched so much to fit 10 ads, with the real content tucked away only at the end.
Good to see that AI slop would inundate and suffocate these media houses.
3eb7988a1663 12 hours ago
There is also the mocumentary flick of the Excel eTournament scene with "Makro"
Yossarrian22 6 hours ago
I’ll always think of my fellow excel wizards as sheet heads thanks to this video
Apocryphon 10 hours ago
Don’t forget part two
HPsquared 10 hours ago
Life imitates art.
beasthacker 11 hours ago
This is too good.
machros 11 hours ago
Not unlikely it inspired the whole pro excel scene to exist.
Sniffnoy 2 hours ago
donsupreme 11 hours ago
Should be 'Michael Jordan of spreadsheets'
buybackoff 11 hours ago
The Spiderman would be better. If anyone used formulas' precedents/dependents that would be instantly visual.
littlestymaar 11 hours ago
Did he retired spreadsheets to become a professional baseball player?
jasonthorsness 12 hours ago
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
shagie 11 hours ago
> but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language
There is little difference between (if (> a b) c d) and =IF((A1 > B1), C1, D1)
Excel is the most widely installed functional programming language IDE.
lmz 7 hours ago
It even has LAMBDA now: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-b...
OoooooooO 11 hours ago
Change the language of your Windows system to anything but English and then open your Excel file with formulas again.
NooneAtAll3 10 hours ago
mmooss 11 hours ago
Bridged7756 12 hours ago
Yup. Not too long ago they added Python scripting. Definitely beats the weird cloud scripting you have to do with Google Sheets.
HPsquared 10 hours ago
Excel Python runs in the cloud. It is nicely integrated though.
paddy_m 12 hours ago
I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?
doctorhandshake 11 hours ago
I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.
bost-ty 4 hours ago
Hi! Do you remember the name of that competition? Super interested in that.
I've seen your work at Hard Work Party before, by the way! Really cool stuff, glad to see you've also got the startup going as well.
wildzzz 7 hours ago
In high school, I participated in a STEM-based competition. There were a ton of categories like CO2 dragsters (my favorite), architecture, 2D and 3D CAD, GIS, and numerous others I can't remember. Some categories had more of a business focus but most were science/engineering related. The 3D CAD one was pretty fun. I recall two parts. In the first half, you got a hand-drawn sketch of a bushing and had to recreate it in Autodesk Inventor as fast as possible and then generate a 2D drawing properly dimensioned (like what you'd hand to a machinist). The second half involved creating all of the parts for a basic ceiling fan and then making an animated exploded view that also spun the fan. I was really good at that stuff back then but I definitely wasn't the quickest. I'm sure it's a lot different now, so much of CAD now involved CNC and 3D printing that's there's probably aspects that include messing with gcode now.
My GIS competition was fun too. They gave me a bunch of map data and I had to produce a report on Washington DC storm surge flood zones and potential rescue helicopter locations all within a couple hours.
I recall there being a video production category too. I didn't compete in it but you'd be given props and dialogue to turn into a video over the course of a day or two. Very few of the categories were contemporaneous competitions, most were long term project presentations.
colmmacc 12 hours ago
The Oscars, The Golden Globes, the Emmys, just a few!
chongli 11 hours ago
Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.
tshaddox 9 hours ago
anamexis 11 hours ago
salviati 12 hours ago
You never get to see the action there. Just the finished product.
Waterluvian 11 hours ago
dfxm12 4 hours ago
These reward the artistry of the output of the edits, not the productivity of the editors.
DaiPlusPlus 8 hours ago
> wonder if there are video editting competitions?
Yes - but they've turned into something I'd really rather not watch: https://www.opus.pro/agent/human-creator-vs-ai
analog31 9 hours ago
Or any users for that matter. The familiar "I can't see how anybody can stand to use Excel" is too widespread to be dismissed as a fluke.
lysace 11 hours ago
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.
If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)
etbebl 10 hours ago
I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.
orlp 10 hours ago
The person you replied to stated:
> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools
There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.
I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.
I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
dyauspitr 8 hours ago
There is a head to head CAD guy on Youtube. I wish I could remember his name, I’ll look it up and update this post.
jjmarr 12 hours ago
Does Microsoft gain useful information about product UX from this? Wondering if any Excel PMs watch this and see where micro-optimizations are made.
lysace 11 hours ago
Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 100x millions worth of exposure.
eszed 9 hours ago
Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.
Let alone the date issues.
At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.
lysace 9 hours ago
ciupicri 8 hours ago
From 2020: "Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)
lysace 8 hours ago
emeril 5 hours ago
def 2 decades - 2023 was the best version and it has been downhill ever since
I'll admit, on occasion having more than 65k rows is helpful but generally that's the domain of a database, not excel and it wasn't a good tradeoff IMO
lysace 5 hours ago
mmooss 8 hours ago
> Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
What does that mean? Microsoft stopped developing new features? You think it was feature-complete?
d-lisp 11 hours ago
Looks a bit like vimgolfing [0]
triclops200 12 hours ago
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
Obligatory Krazam sketch: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY?si=h6QR2gzac48R6kca
sieep 12 hours ago
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
airstrike 11 hours ago
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
NooneAtAll3 10 hours ago
Any link to the problems that were being solved?
scop 10 hours ago
You know what they say about the Irish and spreadsheets…
esafak 8 hours ago
If you want to know what God thinks of spreadsheets, just look at the company He let build them.
djaouen 11 hours ago
Come Feel The Heat With These Great Feats of Spreadsheets lol
Edit: Of course, they changed the title! [1]
xattt 11 hours ago
I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.
secretsatan 10 hours ago
Possibly messing with the guys who handle the money make for the loudest complaints
otterley 11 hours ago
It's almost as though organizations are made of human beings who have complicated relationships, differing opinions, and nuanced thinking.
bongodongobob 10 hours ago
I had a negative view of MS when I was young. Then I got jobs at large orgs managing IT for 1000s of people. I don't know how else you'd do it without the Microsoft stack. I'm not saying you can't, but good luck managing whatever custom ball of knots you manage to come up with and also finding people to work on it for you. If you think open office and some kind of custom IAM solution will work, you just don't have the experience to have an opinion on it, IMHO.
unmole 30 minutes ago
My employer has thousands of employees across six countries, runs complex, multi-billion-dollar supply chains, and somehow manages just fine without the Microsoft stack.