For many, Microsoft Excel remains an opaque nightmare to be avoided. Yet for power users, it’s a battleground where efficiency is king and speed is glory.

Dan Kidney, 32, in London, discovered his flair by creating bespoke Excel obstacle courses on TikTok. His videos have amassed over 300,000 followers, proving that excelling at Excel can be as thrilling as any traditional sport.

Jonathan Tristan, a former investment banker now known as “Your Finance Brother,” encourages keyboard-only navigation and even suggests removing the F1 key for maximum speed. He believes every minute saved equates to more sleep—valuable in the cutthroat world of Wall Street.

In this new esport, speed is not just about personal gain but also about competition. Drew Koontz, a data analyst who runs Encyclopedia Excel, highlights the rise of challenges and speedruns as key components for community engagement. The 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championships in Las Vegas crowned Diarmuid Early from Ireland as the “LeBron James of spreadsheets.”

Others like Ryan Park have used tutorials to democratise these skills, helping tens of thousands improve their productivity through gamification techniques inspired by his own experience cleaning and reorganising 401(k) data.