Excel Power Users Turn Spreadsheets Into a Spectator Sport

For most people, Microsoft Excel is a digital dreadnought to be sidestepped at any opportunity. Perhaps you padded your CV with a dubious claim of “proficiency” and have spent your career dodging the inevitable moment of exposure. Or maybe you can cobble together a VLOOKUP, but the labyrinthine interface keeps true mastery perpetually out of reach.

Love it or hate it, the software remains an indispensable engine of modern commerce, with Microsoft reporting “hundreds of millions” of active users worldwide. Yet for a vibrant subculture of creators, the spreadsheet is far more than a business tool. It’s a competitive arena, a canvas for speed, and a source of genuine entertainment. These digital athletes thrive on achieving ninja-like efficiency, and they are eager to share their arcane wisdom with anyone brave enough to watch. By showcasing jaw-dropping productivity hacks and posting blistering times on custom “obstacle runs,” they have cultivated massive online fandoms. Some even square off in official Excel championships, competing for cash prizes and, of course, the ultimate bragging rights.

But the pursuit of spreadsheet glory is only half the story. At its core, this community is fundamentally about collective improvement and lifting others up.

Dan Kidney, a 32-year-old based in London, tells WIRED he “accidentally” became an Excel expert while crunching insurance data and building his own ecommerce venture from the ground up. He never imagined he’d end up teaching others the trade secrets he accumulated along the way. “I decided to start using my spare time to post on TikTok as an experiment during a planned employment break,” he says, initially sharing beginner-friendly tutorials on essential functions. A few weeks in, he uploaded a video of himself racing through a self-designed Excel obstacle course, and the response was explosive. The clip rocketed past 1 million views in days, with commenters marveling that he had finished each challenge before they could even read the instructions.

Today, Kidney commands a combined 300,000 followers across his Instagram and TikTok accounts under the banner “Functional Excel.” His speedruns have even sparked unexpected ripples beyond the corporate world. He recounts how a schoolteacher in rural Germany, after seeing his videos, assigned students to practice on his templates, culminating in a classroom competition.

Over on the West Coast, Jonathan Tristan, a 29-year-old former investment banker known online as “Your Finance Brother,” delivers a blunt verdict to his audience: “Your Excel skills suck.” In a recent video on his TikTok and Instagram pages, he advocates for a radical approach: abandon the mouse entirely and navigate the spreadsheet with a torrent of keyboard shortcuts. He even ups the ante with a bold directive: “Pop the F1 key off your keyboard.”

Tristan explains that seasoned Excel users develop distinct “stylistic preferences,” and removing the F1 key is a perfect blend of practicality and showing off. “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 elaborates. The catch? Hitting F1, which sits dangerously close, summons a help menu and grinds your momentum to a halt. (Besides, would a true power user ever need assistance?)

Tristan, who shares his own blistering speedruns with roughly 700,000 followers, says he offers this kind of guidance because every second matters when you’re grinding through marathon Wall Street hours. Spending ten hours a day in Excel, he notes, means a 10 percent efficiency gain is the difference between “getting five hours of sleep versus six hours of sleep.”