'Satisfying victory': Toronto man wins world Excel spreadsheet championships in Vegas

A man uses a computer keyboard in Toronto Oct. 9, 2023, in this photo illustration. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graeme Roy

A Toronto man who excelled to secure the title of a global spreadsheet champion last week calls his unusual achievement a "satisfying victory."

Michael Jarman won the Microsoft Excel World Championships in a Las Vegas arena on Dec. 4., after an hours-long competition in front of a couple of hundred people – and many others who watched the event on ESPN3 and YouTube streams.

Competitors were tasked with solving "out-of-the-box problems" by using their knowledge of Excel functions, data management skills and logical thinking.

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Jarman, who immigrated to Canada from the United Kingdom in 2017, received a cheque for US$5,000 and a wrestling-style belt with the title of spreadsheet champion.

The tricky part, Jarman said, was leaving Las Vegas with the belt in tow.

Travelling back to Toronto with it was "a nightmare," he said, and taking it to the U.K. for a victory lap in front of his friends was impossible.

"It's genuinely very nice, sort of a leather wrestling belt. It's quite large," he said in an interview. "Unfortunately, I haven't been able to really pack it ... it genuinely didn't fit the suitcase."

The belt will be "mounted on a wall somewhere, possibly with the TV, but we haven't thought about it yet," he added.

Jarman, who started competing in world spreadsheeting events in 2017, said using Excel is part of his job as the head of model development for a firm that builds and audits spreadsheets for large infrastructure projects – but it's also something he enjoys doing for fun.

"I think most people do it because they genuinely find it, like, quite fun to do," he said. "It is quite a lot of work, sort of doing all the practice and keeping up with all the new features."

Jarman placed third in a precursor to the Excel world competition called ModelOff in 2017, and then won that championship in 2018.

He said that competition "took the view that a lot of the people who are making the finals have made the finals too many times" so certain competitors weren't allowed to come anymore.

"But I'd only just turned up, so I was allowed to stay. So it was much easier to win."

He said the Excel competition in Vegas allowed him to "compete against the best" in the niche community.

"It's much more of a satisfying victory."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 11, 2024.