- Excel continues to grow as a popular eSport
- The Microsoft Excel World Championships (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle took place on the weekend of July 11, 2026
- Four competitors went to cell-to-cell, but there was only one winner
The Microsoft Excel World Championships (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle has declared its first winner, Ireland’s Diarmuid Early, who previously won the December 2025 Excel World Championship.
MEWC’s Landmark Battle featured four competitors, with Early featuring Andrew Ngai, Jaq Kennedy and Nicolas Micot. The game lasted only 30 minutes and wasn’t just a “landmark event” – it took place at four physical landmarks.
Co-sponsored by ASUS, competitors were forced to compete outdoors in New York, London, Paris and Australia, all typing and CTRL-wing furiously on ExpertBook Ultras with handy wireless portable external displays. The Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and Sydney Harbor were the literal landmarks of the event.
Get up early to win
Look at
The MEWC is not a new event, first held 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 achievements in the world of business data management.
However, these are not boring, C-suite results. On this occasion, the competitors took on the Around The World in 80 Days inspired Excel challenge, the latest in an inventive selection. This was conceived to reflect remote workers whose efforts are “across customer sites, airports, coffee shops, co-working spaces and remote locations rather than behind a desk in an office.”
Andrew Grigolyunovich is the founder of the Microsoft Excel World Championship. “Landmark Battle was unlike anything we’ve done before,” he said. “Seeing elite competitors perform from some of the world’s most iconic landmarks, powered by ASUS, showed just how far Excel Esports can go.”
Past events have seen competitors tasked with completing puzzles using Excel, slot games and the 2D Excel-based platformer, Modelario.
Early’s win – ironically late in the game – gave him a 40-point lead at the last minute over Andrew Ngai, but due to the worldwide nature of the game, no one knew who had won until the game was over.
As you can see in the YouTube video, each contestant was accompanied by only one cameraman, and you can see the reactions as the results are confirmed.
Esports or Excel sports?
Esports has become big business in recent years, but events tend to revolve around games like League of Legends, Dota or CS:GO.
As esports events go, Microsoft Excel is not the obvious spectator sport. But if you have the skills to work magic with formulas and numbers arranged in rows and columns, they could be a dead cert for next year’s Microsoft Excel World Championship.
Qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup have already begun, with the event once again taking place in Las Vegas – and Early looks a dead cert to triumph again.
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