Every year we sit down to watch The International. While we may not play as much Dota 2 as we used to, the energy at these events is infectious enough to get you excited.

Many esports are like this though and the latest obsession we have is with Excel esports. No, not the team Excel, the software, Microsoft Office Excel.

You may have seen mention of this online this week following a rebroadcast of a tournament on ESPN last weekend. The tournament in question is the Financial Modeling World Cup’s Excel Esports: ALL-STAR BATTLE embedded below.

The competition is described as such over on the Financial Modeling World Cup’s website.

“Participants solve unusual game tasks in Excel. No finance, just Excel and logical thinking skills. Use IFS, XLOOKUP, SUM, VBA, Power Query: anything is allowed, and the strategy is up to you,” reads a description.

The broadcast includes a scorecard as well as the actions per minute (APM) of each competitor and you really can’t help, but get excited. We even learned that Microsoft’s emoji don’t play well with Adobe products. The commentary helps to give you an idea of what is going on but don’t feel bad if you were lost about what is happening on screen,

We were also shocked to learn that there are even continent battles in the FMWC and one of them took place in Africa just last month.

If you reckon you’re good enough to compete in Excel Esports, the FMWC Open 2022 is taking place in October through to November. It does cost $25 to enter, but you have a chance of winning a share of $10 000.

You can find details about that tournament here.

Excel as an esport. We suddenly regret not paying more attention during Computer Studies in high school.