The Verge's David Pierce Reports On the Excel World Championship From Vegas (theverge.com) 29
In a featured article for The Verge, David Pierce explores the world of competitive Excel, highlighting its rise from a hobbyist activity to a potential esport, showcased during the Excel World Championship in Las Vegas. Top spreadsheet enthusiasts competed at the MGM Grand to solve complex Excel challenges, emphasizing the transformative power and ubiquity of spreadsheets in both business and entertainment. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.
There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want -- the reality is you're still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they're doing it in Vegas. You really can't overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. "Electronic spreadsheets" actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. "I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers," he said in a 2016 TED Talk. This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then. [...]
Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.
There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want -- the reality is you're still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they're doing it in Vegas. You really can't overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. "Electronic spreadsheets" actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. "I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers," he said in a 2016 TED Talk. This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then. [...]
Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.
amazing (Score:2)
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Well, two dimensions seems to be enough to do anything.
Just look at how far we've come on the simple binary system with just ones and zeros.
Re:amazing (Score:4, Informative)
It's only 2D if you're constraining yourself to a single sheet. Given Excel supports multiple sheets in a document (as a workbook), it can be considered a 3D array since a workbook is a collection of 2D spreadsheets.
If you need higher dimensions, I think Excel can cross-ref using files as well, giving you the ability to construct 4D hypercubes of spreadsheet cells.
The people who enter these competitions are basically Excel wizards who know how to exploit every feature to get the data in the way they need for the competition
And it's decent - there's an implementation of GPT-2 (once considered "too scary" to release) as an Excel spreadsheet. It's a way of teaching you how a LLM AI works since you can manually execute it step by step and see how the weights and such change as its executed.
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Spreadsheets and dimensions.
Each sheet is a 2D grid. Multiple sheets gets you a third dimension. You can fiddle with sheets to get a fourth or use multiple workbooks to do the same. Did I say each sheet? ... each table is a 2D grid ... and of course each sheet can hold multiple tables. Oh, did I say table? ... within each table you could have a column that signifies a change of "dimension".
You could ignore all of that and with careful encoding create as many dimensions as you like within one column, unti
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Each sheet is a 2D grid. Multiple sheets gets you a third dimension. You can fiddle with sheets to get a fourth or use multiple workbooks to do the same.
Yeah, and in theory you can run SQL queries on a flat text file. In practice it's not the same.
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Spreadsheets [xkcd.com]
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You could ignore all of that and with careful encoding create as many dimensions as you like within one column, until you hit a row limit.
Exactly this. Dimensionality is data about data that can be placed in a 1-to-1 correspondence. For a machine, the number of dimensions can be arbitrarily high. Any presentation with 2D grids, etc., can be considered a visual slice or projection that helps us poor humans make sense of things.
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The fundamental limitation of the single spreadsheet paradigm arises from the representation of iteration, which is typically done in a row or column layout. Once you have an iterative calculation, and that's pretty common, you're going to use up one or more columns with parti
Excel world championship? (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, I can't attend .. I'll be at the world tooth pulling championship.
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I'd like to see an obfuscated Excel world championship.
Wait ... I guess that's redundant.
Is that an internal dupe? (Score:2)
Do my eyes deceive me?
Have we achieved our first "dupe inside a dupe"?
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Well it is Beau. QC is not a feature.
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yes, we have
yes, we have
30 seconds... (Score:2)
...and that damn page started giving me a headache and anxiety.... I see spreadsheets in my nightmares..
I beg to differ (Score:3)
There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun.
Designing a spreadsheet is like solving a puzzle, and on a daily basis many people PAY to do just that. Making spreadsheets is also rather like programming - I've done a little bit of both, and to me the similarities are obvious. As an aside, I've had fun doing both of those things. Does that make me a freak, or even an outlier? No! I may be either or both of those; but not because I sometimes find programming and spreadsheets to be fun.
Anything which requires thought, ingenuity, and experimentation can be and probably is fun, for some (likely non-trivial) percentage of the population.
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The problem with spreadsheets is not that they are "rather like programming". The problem is that they ARE programming, except that almost no-one who writes them knows that, or has any knowledge of how to write good, safe, well documented programs.
The result is you get spreadsheets which are used to make decisions involving billions which are go-to filled spaghetti, undocumented (because there is no place to put comments), totally unstructured. You can't even read the code - performing some operation on e
"Spreadsheets are not fun" (Score:5, Insightful)
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LMFTFY (Score:2)
Relief at last! (Score:2)
"Spreadsheet enthusiasts." (Score:2)
Anything like that for presentations/slides? (Score:2)
Anything like that for presentations/slides? I understand why you wouldn't compete with a word processor but presentations should be compete-able!
Wait, what? (Score:2)
"Electronic spreadsheets" actually date back earlier than computers
I'ma hafta look that up later. Or perhaps even RTFA.