- Excel continues to grow as a popular esport
- The first Landmark Battle of the Microsoft Excel World Championship (MEWC) took place on the weekend of July 11, 2026.
- Four competitors competed cell to cell, but there was only one winner
The first Landmark Battle of the Microsoft Excel World Championship (MEWC) has declared its first winner, Ireland’s Diarmuid Early, who previously won the Excel World Championship in December 2025.
The MEWC Landmark Battle featured four competitors, Early joined by Andrew Ngai, Jaq Kennedy and Nicolas Micot. Lasting just 30 minutes, the match was not just a “historic event”: it took place across four physical venues.
Co-sponsored by ASUS, competitors were forced to compete outdoors in New York, London, Paris and Australia, all furiously typing and CTRL-Ving on ExpertBook Ultras with convenient wireless portable external displays. The Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and Sydney Harbor were the real monuments of the event.
Get up early to win
Look on it
The MEWC is not a new event, having first taken place in 2021, with the 2022 broadcast on ESPN.
The competition pits Excel experts against each other to solve complex challenges posed by other Excel experts, no doubt with a few Microsoft Certified Professional qualifications buried among their other accomplishments in the world of enterprise data management.
These are not boring results for the C-suites, however. On this occasion, the competitors took on the Excel challenge inspired by Around the World in 80 Days, the latest addition to an inventive selection. This was designed to reflect remote workers, whose efforts take place “at client sites, airports, cafes, coworking spaces and remote locations, rather than behind a desk in an office.”
Andrew Grigolyunovich is the founder of the Microsoft Excel World Championship. “The Landmark battle was unlike anything we had done before,” he said. “Watching elite competitors perform from some of the world’s most iconic landmarks, powered by ASUS, showed how far Excel Esports can go.
Previous events have seen competitors tasked with solving puzzles using Excel, slot games and the Excel-based 2D platformer, Modelario.
Early’s victory – which, ironically, came late in the match – gave him a 40-point, last-minute lead over Andrew Ngai, but due to the global nature of the game, no one knew who won until the end of the match.
As you can see in the YouTube video, each contestant was accompanied by just a cameraman, and you’ll be able to see the reactions as the results are confirmed.
Esport or Excel-sport?
Esports has become big business in recent years, but events tend to revolve around games such as League of Legends, Dota or CS:GO.
When it comes to esports events, Microsoft Excel isn’t the obvious sport for spectators. But if you have the skills to work magic with formulas and numbers arranged in rows and columns, they could be a dead certificate for next year’s Microsoft Excel World Championship.
Qualifying for the 2026 world championship has already begun, with the event once again taking place in Las Vegas – and Early looks a certainty to triumph again.
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