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

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.

Comments

April Fool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait... today is not April 1st.

W.T.F.???

Re: April Fool!

[Immerman]

More's the pity.

Re: April Fool!

[mspohr]

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.

Re: April Fool!

[jandersen]

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.

Now: LibreOffice championship?

[Futurepower(R)]

Let's have a LibreOffice championship.

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

Re: good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

AKA

[bobstreo]

The Microsoft Special Olympics.

Re:good for them

[unixisc]

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

I died inside.

[Zobeid]

This article kills my soul.

You're doing it wrong.

[geekmux]

"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.

Re: good for them

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:I have a masters in Excel only 150K in loans an

[Darinbob]

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