There are many ways to measure your mastery of Microsoft Excel: the admiration of your peers, the efficiency of your formulae, the beauty of your tables and graphs. But for the true spreadsheet wizards there's only one distinction that matters, and it's a massive championship wrestling belt.
I'm talking of course about the Microsoft Excel World Championship belt, which was just awarded this week to newly-minted MEWC 2025 champion Diarmuid Early after three days of Excel competition live in Las Vegas.
Early beat out previous three-time champ Andrew Ngai, who took second place in this year's competition and gave a nice speech passing the belt to Early during yesterday's (December 3) award ceremony.
You can watch the ceremony yourself at the end of the MEWC 2025 Finals livestream, which is now viewable on demand over on Microsoft's Excel eSports YouTube channel. And while you may not have the stamina to watch all four hours of the 2025 Excel finals, I definitely recommend skipping around and watching bits like the amazing wrestler-style intros (featuring competitors charging into the arena while an announcer screams their name) or the final minute of competition, when Ngai tries and fails to reclaim the top spot.
To get to the finals you have to go through a series of competitions throughout the year, and if you make it you end up in an Excel-off in which everyone receives the same "case" of challenges to complete in 30 minutes. Each case contains seven levels of questions with increasing difficulty as well as bonus questions, and competitors receive points for solving each question correctly.
Whoever gets the most points at the end of the round wins, with ties decided by who got there first. But what I found extra exciting about watching the MEWC 2025 finals is that every five minutes the player with the lowest score is eliminated, until only six players remain. At that point they're all in it to win it and battle it out to see who scores highest, but up until then the countdown to elimination adds a delightful frisson to the otherwise spreadsheet-heavy stream.
And if you (like me) don't know a thing about using Excel well, don't worry — the announcers who are commenting live over the finals and hyping the crowd up do a good job providing explanations and commentary that helps liven up the competition.
Microsoft chief Satya Nadella even had a video of himself taking part (for funsies) posted on his X account, but with a twist. Nadella used Excel's new Agent Mode, which was announced last month and taps into Microsoft's 365 Copilot AI services to let you request Excel complete tasks using natural language.
With the Excel World Championship underway, I decided to take the M365 Copilot digital challenge. I’m no World Champ… but thanks to Agent Mode, I held my own! pic.twitter.com/xoNBGxQtCADecember 4, 2025
It's a blatant bit of promotion for Microsoft's AI services, which have become a core focus of the company's marketing and development efforts.
Of course, as someone who reviews Windows and Copilot+ PCs for a living here at Tom's Guide I can tell you that (at least in my experience) the reality often fails to live up to the hype. And while I haven't had a chance to test out Excel's new Agent Mode yet, I can't help but wonder how all these spreadsheet mavens who spend so much time and effort competing to be the best feel about Microsoft promoting AI alongside them.
Will AI one day make these sorts of competitions feel quaint, or will it be like the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov chess matches of the '90s and motivate a whole new generation to try and outperform the AI? We'll just have to wait and see!
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