You may know it as the business app that makes tables pretty and numbers add up, but Microsoft’s Excel 2016 is an incredibly powerful and versatile piece of software capable of generating visualisations, generating interactives and – yes – analysing lots of numbers. It’s so adaptable, in fact, that some enterprising people have even used its tables and formulas to build simple games, and even make pixel art.

In order to showcase its many abilities, Microsoft is running a competition to find the South African with the best Excel-fu, who can turn a spreadsheet into a something beautiful and creative.

That spreadsheet master will win some pretty nifty prizes from Microsoft and fellow sponsors Dell and LGIT, including a Dell Latitude E7470 notebook, a subscription to Office 365, a Lumia 1320 smartphone, a Jabra headset and a Microsoft mouse.

The rules of the competition are simple: all you have to do is download the current spreadsheet challenge from Microsoft South Africa’s Facebook page, try to solve it and email your finished attempt to excelsa[at]microsoft[dot]com.

The initial deadline for round one of the competition was the 4th of April, but due to a flood of requests from people who didn’t enter in time, Microsoft has decided to allow anyone to enter the second leg of the competition as if they’d made it through the first leg. That leg opens on the 11th of April and closes on the 15th.

On the 25th of April, the top ten entrants will be announced, who will then be given the next spreadsheet-based problem to solve by 12pm on the 6th of May. The winners of that leg will be announced on the 12th of May, whittling the field down to just three contestants. Those three people will face off against one another on the 27th of May at Microsoft’s South African headquarters in a live clash of Excel skills, will and raw talent.

And be warned, htxt.africa’s own editor-in-chief will be on the judging panel, so your work had better be good.

LGIT, founded in 2000 with nothing but a vision, is a pioneer and leader in the Microsoft Training field today and was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Learning Partner of the Year Award in 2015.

Dell is, of course, a well-known purveyor of everything IT-related, from servers to notebooks to networking equipment, and has also been known to take a keen interest in developing the skills and knowledge of the people living in the countries it which it operates. Microsoft’s Excel Champs is just one such initiative the big IT vendor is interested in.

If this sounds like something you’d like to take part in, keep an eye on Microsoft South Africa’s Facebook page on the 11th of April.