British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Q: How many Excel users do you need to correctly set the number formatting of a cell? A: Monday, January 1st, 1900

The inaugural finals of the UK Excel Championship have come and gone, and there is now one spreadsheet wrangler to rule them all, at least in the United Kingdom.

The winner is self-proclaimed Excel enthusiast Ha Dang, a qualified accountant working for a Leeds-based company. The victory means that Dang will head to Las Vegas this December to represent the UK in the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship.

After a number of online rounds, the finals were livestreamed from an in-person event in London.

Points are awarded for solving problems using Excel, and the competition was a nail-biter, with Lorenzo Foti and Dang exchanging the lead as the final minutes counted down. Foti got to within seven points of Dang before the latter pulled away, ending 11 points ahead. The final score was Ha Dang with 2,474 points and Lorenzo Foti with 2,463.

Dang said, "It was a hard fought battle.

"To win by 11 points out of a maximum possible 3,750 is what some might call 'by the skin of my teeth'."

The UK chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship wrote, "Around 30 competitors vied to be crowned the UK champion.

"The competitors' wits have been thoroughly tested: they have battled through three challenging cases, surrendering to the malice and humility of the case designers, solving difficult problems of Excel, mathematics, and logic."

Dang is indeed somewhat of an Excel obsessive. Where some children might have been drawing on the walls with crayons, Dang recalled, "I remember at five years old being drawn to the telly screen when there were educational programmes on and finding it fascinating that typing in some texts (which I now suspect to be VLOOKUP formulae) could make stuff 'magically' appear on a grid."

VLOOKUP is useful for finding items in a table or a range by row. These days XLOOKUP is Microsoft's preferred option, although a recent version of Excel is required.

In a LinkedIn post, Dang said, "Throughout my life I have been given 'nudges' to become better at Excel. I caught sight of a book on '100 Most Useful Excel Functions' in the university library the day before I started my internship, which I eagerly borrowed and applied all through that summer at the workplace."

It will be 40 years since the initial release of Microsoft Excel at the end of this month. Before becoming a mainstay of Microsoft's suite of Windows productivity applications, the spreadsheet arrived on the Apple Macintosh. It went on to dominate at the expense of competitors, such as Lotus 1-2-3.

The spreadsheet has met with controversy over the years. People blamed it for the occasional mistake, such as data blunders during the pandemic, or misuse by performers trying to send SMS messages in music videos.

Although "send a text from an old Nokia" wasn't one of the challenges faced by competitors, Dang noted, "Each challenge encourages me to explore functions I don’t normally use or find new use cases for existing functions."

The Las Vegas finals will run from December 1 to 3. ®