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High School Students Compete In 'Microsoft Office Championship' (latimes.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the extracurricular-activities dept.

An anonymous reader writes: This week the L.A. Times described a 17-year-old from Virginia who'd spent several hours a day perfecting his technique in Microsoft Excel, "one of 150 students from 50 countries competing in the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship" at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. "At stake: cash, prizes and the clout that comes with being the best in the world at Excel, PowerPoint or Word. 'I'm going to do my best to bring it home for the United States,' John said as he prepared for the competition."

Microsoft's VP of Worldwide Education said the event helps students "to become more employable to companies that build their businesses around the Microsoft suite." For example, the article points out, "Past winners have gone on to attend Ivy League colleges and even work at, yes, Microsoft... Delaware resident Anirudh Narayanan, 17, prepared all summer to compete in the Excel 2013 category, 'looking up obscure facts just in case I might need to know it during the test.' He's hoping the skills he honed will help him at Carnegie Mellon University, where he will begin studying economics in the fall. 'I make sure I do a minimum of five hours a week in Excel,' Anirudh said. 'Then for a while I'll be on YouTube watching videos about Excel.'"
John eventually won the first-place prize in the Excel category -- which was $7,000 and an Xbox.

25 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. April Fool! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wait... today is not April 1st.

    W.T.F.???

    1. Re: April Fool! by tysonedwards · · Score: 2

      What's the job? Administrative Assistant? I thought the key criteria there was being attractive.

      --
      Thirty four characters live here.
    2. Re: April Fool! by Immerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      More's the pity.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    3. Re: April Fool! by supremebob · · Score: 2

      Financial analysts LOVE Excel for their financial models. Junior analysts spend so much time using it that their bosses often take away their mice and force them to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts to improve their productivity.

    4. Re: April Fool! by dougdonovan · · Score: 2

      good for the hourly wage students since basicly every office uses ms office products.

    5. Re: April Fool! by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      So is Matlab and Gnuplot. The difference is, they're actually useful.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    6. Re: April Fool! by davester666 · · Score: 2

      a close second is being on the pill.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    7. Re: April Fool! by mspohr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem with spreadsheets is that there is no way to audit the results. It's very easy for a spreadsheet to become corrupted through inattentive programming or random unintended manipulation. Anything beyond a few hundred cells should be looked on with suspicion.
      It's scary to think of the decisions which are being made with these flaky tools.

      --
      I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
    8. Re: April Fool! by jandersen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Excel is used heavily in scientific analysis of data.

      An extraordinary claim like needs a bit more detail - as well as quotations. Spreadsheets are no doubt useful for quick and dirty ad-hoc calculations, and one can imagine a scientist running a limited data set through one, while deciding on which model to build on a massively parallel super computer - which BTW most likely runs Linux - but spreadsheets are meant to be used primarily by managers and their assistants. I think one big limitation with a spreadsheet is that it is two-dimensional and cannot easily be modified to model a larger number of dimensions; it also sort of sits between specialities: it is like a database, with each sheet being a bit like a table, but you would never replace a database with it. You can perform calculations - even quite complicated ones - but you would never use it for serious number crunching; at the end of the day, your calculations are interpreted, not compiled, and you are running on a desktop computer, not TFLOPS hardware, and many real datasets contain billions of rows.

    9. Re: April Fool! by OneAhead · · Score: 2

      Spreadsheets are no doubt useful for quick and dirty ad-hoc calculations, and one can imagine a scientist running a limited data set through one

      Ah, but you see, the vast majority of scientific papers do involve limited data sets, and yes, these have often been processed by nothing more than a spreadsheet. Building a special supercomputer for that would qualify as "premature optimization" (as well as an unbelievable waste of time) if there ever was such thing.

      Though that spreadsheet may just as well have been Libreoffice calc - at least in some branches of science, FOSS is far more popular than in the "mainstream". Excel has zero special merit in this respect.

      But to get back on topic, GP's point is probably that it's not a waste of time at all for kids to decently learn to use a spreadsheet - something I would strongly agree with. Believe it or not, but spreadsheet usage is a key "problematic skill" in some universities' student influx. (Where a "problematic skill" would in this context be defined at a relevant and important skill that is really below university level to teach so that the burden falls on the high schools, which unfortunately don't do a sufficiently good job at it. See also: writing skills, basic math.)

    10. Re:April Fool! by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 2

      Clearly the kid just wanted to excel

      --

      Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

  2. good for them by turkeydance · · Score: 2

    they got paid

    1. Re:good for them by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Yeah, it makes me hate Microsoft a little more somehow, but you can't blame kids for getting paid. Seven grand and an Xbox? Pretty sweet if you ask me.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re: good for them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The kid put in 3500 hours of studying so that works out to $2.00/hour. That minimum wage clerical job waiting for him is gonna look pretty juicy.

    3. Re:good for them by unixisc · · Score: 4, Funny

      Did this championship get opened by cutting a ribbon? That would have been ironically funny

    4. Re: good for them by unixisc · · Score: 2

      Why would they need to study? A lot of practice w/ documents, spreadsheets (including pivot tables) and presentations (including embedded worksheets w/ animations) would get them there.

    5. Re: good for them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Gee that sounds a lot like studying.

    6. Re: good for them by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The kid put in 3500 hours of studying so that works out to $2.00/hour. That minimum wage clerical job waiting for him is gonna look pretty juicy.

      Of all the Microsoft applications he could have put time into, Excel is probably the best. The skills learned there will transfer to other spreadsheets just fine, and they are really very useful tools.

      As a kid I was fascinated by weird computers and operating systems. There were a lot of them around because I lived in Santa Cruz, worked for Silicon Engineering (originally Sequoia Semiconductor) and Cisco (in the office formerly known as TGV) and hung out with students of UCSC which was a fairly early internet presence... and also employees of pre-Caldera SCO. My Unix hobbyism led to my first sysadmin job, and my early website (with all kinds of fringey content on it, no less) led to my working for Tivoli (just post IBM buyout) in Austin, because the recruiter at the time saw it and then contacted me.

      Aren't we supposed to celebrate nerdism here? The spreadsheet was arguably the first useful application designed for non-programmers.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Now: LibreOffice championship? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Funny

    Let's have a LibreOffice championship.

    LibreOffice needs improvements in its user interface. Those who compete could suggest improvements.

  4. AKA by bobstreo · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Microsoft Special Olympics.

  5. I died inside. by Zobeid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This article kills my soul.

  6. You're doing it wrong. by geekmux · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Past winners have gone on to attend Ivy League colleges..."

    You took on volunteer work. You enrolled in AP courses. You maintained a perfect 4.4 GPA, and never missed a day of school. All in hopes of having that Ivy League college accept you, only to find your bitch ass got passed up by the kid who won a fucking Excel contest.

    Ahh, no one says you're doing it wrong quite like Microsoft.

    1. Re:You're doing it wrong. by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      I'll take some guy who won an excel contest over some brain dead Ivy League can't count to 10 MBA grad any day.

      And why the hell does volunteer work have anything to do with getting into a university!

  7. Re:I have a masters in Excel only 150K in loans an by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's your own fault, you should have gone for a PhD in Excel!

  8. Re:Add another prize by Misagon · · Score: 2

    What would they know? I find it unlikely that these kids would have had anything to compare with. To them, the latest Microsoft Office would already be the pinnacle of user interfaces.
    It is already so much more intuitive than the crap Web 3.0 UI on phones and on the web these days.

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley