This year's Microsoft Excel World Championship was the wildest yet — so who came out on top in the annual spreadsheet super-battle?

• Excel continues to grow as a popular esport
• The Microsoft Excel World Championship’s (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle took place on the weekend of July 11th, 2026
• Four competitors went to cell-to-cell, but there was only one winner

The Microsoft Excel World Championship’s (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle has declared its first winner, Ireland’s Diarmuid Early, who previously won the Excel World Championship in December 2025.

The MEWC’s Landmark Battle featured four competitors, with Early joined by Andrew Ngai, Jaq Kennedy, and Nicolas Micot. Lasting a mere 30 minutes, the game wasn’t simply a “landmark event” – it took place at four physical landmarks.

Co-sponsored by ASUS, the competitors were forced to compete outdoors in New York, London, Paris, and Australia, all typing and CTRL-Ving furiously on ExpertBook Ultras with handy wireless portable external displays. The Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, and Sydney Harbour provided the literal landmarks for the event.

Get up Early to win

The MEWC is not a new event, first being 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, not doubt with a few Microsoft Certified Professional qualifications buried among their other achievements in the world of business data management.

These aren’t boring, C-suite outcomes, however. On this occasion, the competitors took the Around The World in 80 Days-inspired Excel challenge, the latest in an inventive selection. This was conceived to reflect remote workers, whose endeavors are “across client sites, airports, cafés, co-working spaces, and remote locations, instead of behind a desk in an office.”

Andrew Grigolyunovich is the founder of the Microsoft Excel World Championship. "The Landmark Battle was unlike anything we've done before," he said. "Watching elite competitors perform from some of the world's most iconic landmarks, powered by ASUS, showed just how far Excel Esports can go."

Previous events have seen competitors tasked with completing jigsaw puzzles using Excel, slot machine games, and the 2D Excel-based platformer, Modelario.

Early’s win – which ironically enough, was late in the game – gave him a last-minute 40-point lead 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 competitor was accompanied by just a cameraman, and you can see the reactions as the results are confirmed.

Esport, or Excel-sport?

Esports have become big business in recent years, but events tend to circle around games such as League of Legends, Dota, or CS:GO.

As esport events go, Microsoft Excel is not the obvious spectator sport. But if you have the skills to make magic with formulae and numbers arranged in rows and columns, they might be a dead cert for next year’s Microsoft Excel World Championship.

The qualifiers for the 2026 world championship have already commenced, with the event again taking place in Las Vegas – and Early appears to be a dead cert to triumph again.