Widespread

Thoughts on why a story about competitive spreadsheet-ing really resonated.

A photo from an “Excel parade” on the Las Vegas Strip, which I walked in while reporting a story on the wacky world of competitive college Excel.

Widespread

My last story for the Washington Post was also a first of sorts.

It was a sports story — at least in the sense that it ran in the Sunday sports section — that reached way beyond my usual audience. But unlike past times I’d sensed (or hoped that had happened, there was hard, definitive proof.

“Good Noticings,” a pop culture podcast, discussed the story, a narrative look at competitive college Excel, during their Feb. 11 episode. They called the segment “Spreadsheet Olympics,” tucked between discussions of Kamala Harris and “The Jakarta Method.” They emphatically called me a nerd, but only in defense of one of the story’s main characters, whom they thought I had unfairly characterized as a nerd by pointing out that he wore Christmas socks more than three weeks before the holiday. A friend of mine, a devoted listener, took to the comments on Spotify to say: “Jesse Dougherty is the best AND a huge nerd!!” Thanks?

And then the story wound up on “Planet Money,” NPR’s very popular podcast that explores the world through the economy. As part of their annual Valentine’s Day episode, the hosts gave me and the story a virtual valentine. They talked about it for five whole minutes, then shifted to the wonders of Uniqlo’s self checkout machines, which I have personally used and raved about to my wife. The rest of the show touched on the penny (RIP) and 404 Media’s coverage of how ICE is using technology to plan neighborhood raids.

This isn’t the company of a typical sports feature, and it wasn’t just big-name podcasts that latched on. While I was reporting, my wife kept using the story as a party trick, saying to friends and family: So you should hear what Jesse is working on. … If you can believe it, she never did this when I was covering dense college sports lawsuits. But over and over, over drinks and dinner, in bars and on living room couches, I would start to explain my latest fascination:

Yes, there is competitive Excel.

Yes, the championships are in Vegas.

Yes, I’m going.

It’s crazy. I know.

Then, one by one, these friends would promise to read when the story came out, but not in the usual sure-sure-just-please-stop-talking kind of way. They seemed really, genuinely excited. They wanted to know if Beni Weber, one of my main characters, would repeat as college champion. They hoped for trash talk, for gossip from my trip, for drama. They made me feel like I had tapped into something, I just wasn’t sure what.

A good number of people did read the story, if not a massive audience. But once it published, I kept hearing from so many different types of readers, a more diverse reaction than I could remember. And the reason, I think — or at least one reason — is that when you take something so ubiquitous, like using Excel, and make it a sport, people can more easily see a reflection of themselves. That’s damn near impossible when Patrick Mahomes is throwing a touchdown off his back foot. With Excel, though, once you get past the general absurdity of a spreadsheeting competition, many people likely read the story with Excel open in another tab, killing time at their jobs. They maybe read about the cases, about how an Excel competitor would puzzle out a formula to solve 20 Sudoku boards simultaneously, then went back to wrestling with =XLOOKUP and =INDEX+MATCH in their own spreadsheets. Maybe they wondered how they would fare in Vegas. In a weird, goofy, unpredictable way, maybe they felt seen.

The reality is that, at a baseline, the gap between the average Excel user and Weber — the one-time college champion — is very similar to the gap between a solid backyard quarterback and Mahomes. The college and professional Excel competitors don’t use computer mouses, only hot keys. They work at an absolute breakneck pace, making it hard to follow as a layperson (though I have now spent many hours trying). Their problem-solving skills are insane. Their dexterity is insane. They are, in a word, elite.

But a key difference is that that first gap, the one between Weber and the average spreadsheeter, is easier to bridge, even if it could almost never be closed entirely. The Excel elites aren’t throwing a spiral 40 yards. They aren’t dunking or mashing a 98-mph fastball for a home run. They are sitting and typing, typing, typing typing typing.

And everyone types.

After I returned from Vegas, my dad asked me if he could try some of what the competitors did in Excel to streamline his real estate business. I thought about how, in one challenge at the championships, they had to write formulas to make it so an animated bird couldn’t fly into certain cells of a spreadsheet. I told my dad we should probably start a bit smaller.