Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title

I watched the walkthrough video of the solutions and it's genuinely impressive. These aren't just "use VLOOKUP fast" challenges - they're algorithmic puzzles where Excel is the constraint.

What struck me is how similar it is to code golf or competitive programming, just with a different medium. The winner uses array formulas, INDEX/MATCH combinations, and nested functions in ways that most Excel power users would never think of.

The real insight though: Excel is probably the most widely-deployed functional programming environment in the world. Most "business users" are doing functional composition daily without realizing it.

Makes me wonder if we should be teaching programming concepts through Excel first, then moving to traditional languages. The immediate visual feedback is unmatched.

Watch this, where he goes through the questions and explains how he did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mx_xhiIRpw

I'm pretty good with Excel, my main tool at the job for over 20 years. I understand how he did it, but it's just really humbling...

I still think quality of what you do with Excel (idea) is more important than how you do it (skill).

My best Excel trick, which reveals how little I know, and yet Early [0] doesn't use it (or maybe doesn't need it, but that's hard to believe):

1. You can drag down the bottom of the formula bar/field and make it multi-line

2. You can insert arbitrary[*] newlines in an Excel formula

Combining those, you can turn the absurd default format of single-line-of-code functions into something readable and manageable. Here's a simple one from a spreadsheet I have open:

  =INDEX(
  $C$17:$S$24,
  MATCH(A6,$A$17:$A$24,0),
  MATCH(C6,$C$15:$S$15,0)
  )

[0] Early shows how it was done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340638

[*] I think you can do it anywhere but I haven't tested anything crazy; mostly I just use them between expressions.

It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?

I enjoy the idea, and love watching it grow.

I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...

The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.

Can anyone find the actual challenge files? Not that I would be competitive at all, but the description of last year's World of Warcraft themed one is interesting, and I want to walk through it.

There is also the mocumentary flick of the Excel eTournament scene with "Makro"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY

I envy the programmers of Excel. What a beautiful coding task to work on.

Should be 'Michael Jordan of spreadsheets'

The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.

I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?

Does Microsoft gain useful information about product UX from this? Wondering if any Excel PMs watch this and see where micro-optimizations are made.

Looks a bit like vimgolfing [0]

[0] https://www.vimgolf.com/

I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?

Obligatory Krazam sketch: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY?si=h6QR2gzac48R6kca

So BBC is quickly turning into an AI slop lake. The article text is stretched so much to fit 10 ads, with the real content tucked away only at the end.

Good to see that AI slop would inundate and suffocate these media houses.

Any link to the problems that were being solved?

People praise MS Word and Excel there, shitting down on Markdown and proper languages.

The thing is, you have RTF covering a 99% of actual office cases. For the rest, a DTP would be far better, or Texmacs which is far superior for academics. The old WordPad with tables (and Ted for Unix once it's properly setup) would enough to do most boring documentation.

On Excel, just look what happened with Genomics. Also, overabusing Access for management (or worse, to handle Covid cases in a shitty XLS table) it's a nightmare.

For tons of cases TCL/Tk + a Sqlite3 backend would perfectly work and it would be accesible to any platform, from GNU/Linux to MacOS, BSD, Windows. You can stick an HTML5 frontend with ease without even needing JS to access the data (plain HTML forms would work really well).

Ah, yes, graphs, charts. Gnuplot would help you in that case, or a fast Tk package. Reports? TkHTML with some easy CSS. It would cost far more initially? The potential risks on compatibility would be nil in a future. And, as a plus, yo don't have to worry about Macro viruses and whatever.

You know what they say about the Irish and spreadsheets…

Come Feel The Heat With These Great Feats of Spreadsheets lol

Edit: Of course, they changed the title! [1]

[1] https://share.google/qJYSGYMKihkjh7bql

I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.

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