‘Your Excel Skills Suck’: The Power Users Turning Spreadsheets Into a Spectator Sport

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For many people, Microsoft Excel is to be avoided at all costs.

Maybe you lied about being “proficient” with the spreadsheet program to pad out your résumé and have lived in fear of being found out ever since. Or it could be that you do have a grasp on a few basic formulas but find the interface too labyrinthine to truly master.

Still, like it or not, Excel remains an integral part of businesses, with Microsoft claiming “hundreds of millions” of users worldwide. But for a thriving community of content creators, Excel’s uses go far beyond practicality. They live for the thrills of ninja-like Excel efficiency, and they’re happy to impart their esoteric knowledge to those brave enough to seek it out. They amass huge fandoms by demonstrating their flair for unexpected productivity hacks and posting record times on “obstacle runs,” with some even competing in official Excel championships for prize money (and bragging rights).

Vying for spreadsheet glory is just part of the fun, however. At the end of the day, everyone really wants to help each other get better.

Dan Kidney, 32, in London, tells WIRED he “accidentally” leveled up his Excel skills while working as an insurance data analyst and building his own ecommerce company from scratch, though he never expected to teach others the tricks he’d picked up in that time.

“I decided to start using my spare time to post on TikTok as an experiment during a planned employment break,” he explains, first sharing videos covering the Excel functions a beginner should know. A few weeks in, Kidney posted footage of himself racing through the varied challenges of an Excel obstacle course he’d designed himself—and engagement suddenly exploded, pushing the clip to 1 million views within days. Commenters replied that he had completed each page before they’d even had time to read the instructions on it.

Today, Kidney has a combined 300,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok accounts, both called “Functional Excel,” and his speedruns have had a surprising impact beyond his own office. He says a schoolteacher in rural Germany saw his videos and assigned his students to practice Excel on his templates, leading to a class competition.

“Your Excel skills suck,” says Jonathan Tristan, a 29-year-old content creator known as “Your Finance Brother,” in a video recently posted to his TikTok and Instagram pages. Like other influencers in the space, Tristan, who is based in Los Angeles and was previously an investment banker, advocates for dispensing entirely with the mouse and relying only on a flurry of keyboard combination moves to navigate Excel. And he goes one step further: “Pop the F1 key off your keyboard,” he instructs his viewers.

Excel’s power users end up with “stylistic preferences,” Tristan says, and ditching the F1 key is an example of a choice that is both practical and something of a flex. “A really common shortcut you'll use is that you'll basically toggle between the Escape and the F2 key to see what your formula is doing in Excel,” he explains. The problem is that if you accidentally hit F1, which sits between those keys, it brings up a help menu, slowing down your work. (Plus, would a genuine operator ever need help?)

Tristan, who has shared his own impressive Excel speedruns, says he imparts this kind of wisdom to his approximately 700,000 followers because every minute counts when you’re working around the clock on Wall Street—going 10 percent faster if you spend 10 hours a day in Excel, he says, is the difference between “getting five hours of sleep versus six hours of sleep.”

Of course, apart from wanting to clock out earlier, Excelheads are increasingly motivated by a sense of friendly rivalry and the prestige that comes with flawless control over their screens.

“The obstacle courses and speedruns have added another layer to that since you can directly compare times, find better ways to accomplish the same task, and directly compete against each other,” says Drew Koontz, 29, the data analyst behind the tutorial website Encyclopedia Excel. He points out that Excel has become an unlikely esport: Last December in Las Vegas, Diarmuid Early of Ireland—described by some as the “LeBron James of spreadsheets”—won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championships, fending off Andrew Ngai of Australia, who won the tournament three times in a row from 2021 to 2023.

According to Koontz, speed is far from the only way to distinguish oneself in the Excel community. He shouts out engineer George Lungu, the administrator of the web page Excel Unusual, where he demonstrates how the program can be leveraged to create sophisticated animations and more. It’s “probably the most impressive collection of Excel works on the internet,” Koontz says. “He’s built fully working flight simulators, physics engines, roller coasters, planet simulations—it’s crazy.”

Ask an Excel influencer to name someone they credit with expanding the scene, and they’re more than likely to mention Ryan Park. Through his Excel Obstacle Course tutorials and videos, the Cincinnati-based father and data scientist, 49, estimates that he has helped “tens of thousands” of people improve their Excel productivity by gamifying the program.

Park’s Excel expertise came from years of correcting 401(k) data for a company whose clients all had their own methods of arranging spreadsheets. “The processors had to get good at cleaning and reorganizing data with 100 percent accuracy and as fast as possible,” he says. “I loved playing video games like Street Fighter II as a teenager, because learning the ‘special moves’ was so satisfying. That’s how I view the shortcuts I teach—they are the ‘special moves’ of Excel.”

It wasn’t until his coworkers began to comment on his speed that Park realized he was a bit of a savant. “I think there’s something hypnotic about watching someone use Excel without the mouse,” he says. “The clicks and cells flying around have this weird universal appeal.” As he researched Excel content on social media, he found it mostly “boring” and decided to start selling an obstacle course he’d designed for himself and his friends.

Now Park has around 300,000 followers; he’s amused that this audience is a mix of “students” and straight-up fans. “I get comments that say it was soothing to watch or that it gives them ‘tingles,’” he says of the latter group. In an era when tedious labor is commonly delegated to artificial intelligence systems, perhaps there is a heightened pleasure in seeing a real human being match the precision of a machine. Park, for one, brushes off replies about Excel being “so 20 years ago” or claiming that AI could finish a given task in mere seconds. “My response is that I’d be done before they can even explain the desired outcome to an AI tool,” he says.

As for Excel itself, Park doesn’t believe it’s going anywhere: “It’s like saying that pen and paper will be obsolete,” he says. “No way.”