Spreadsheet Champions review: excels in being 100% great value

‘Optimist: the glass is 1/2 full. Pessimist: the glass is 1/2 empty. Excel: the glass is January 2nd.’ If I was a contestant in Spreadsheet Champions, that’s the sort of niche humour I’d be deploying to try and impress the Microsoft judges – because I can’t pivot a table to save myself.

I’m not too worried, though, since I reckon the subjects of this documentary, created by Australian director Kristina Kraskov, will be employed to do exactly that as soon as they graduate.

Every year, kids aged 13-22 from around the globe compete in the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship in Florida, where they can choose to enter in one of three categories: Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. The latter is the hardest (and most prestigious) of them all.

Spreadsheet Champions: what is it about?

In this film, we meet six unique contestants: Braydon Tanti from Australia, Alkmini Gaitantzi from Greece, Carmina Solares from Guatemala, Mason Braithwaite from the USA, Melong Yvan De La Paix from Cameroon, and Pham Trung Nam from Vietnam, all of whom are hoping to take home the top prize.

These kids aren’t just good at Microsoft Office – they excel at it. Through a series of vignettes, we are individually introduced to the students, their home lives and their towns. All come from humble backgrounds (some more humble than others), and each of them live and breathe formulas, cells and data tables.

Now, they have a chance to be named the best in the world – if they can keep calm under pressure and nail the challenges set out for them by Microsoft in the two-ish hours they’re allotted for the contest.

Extrapolating character data in Spreadsheet Champions

Spreadsheet Champions follows a predictable but sturdy formula most often seen in documentaries about sports contests. A good amount of time is taken up getting to know each of the six subjects, which allows us to empathise with them and root for their success before the big day.

As someone who knows nothing about Excel, I could see that each of the students was very intelligent, talented and driven when it came to the software. No insider knowledge is necessary to parse the narrative, which makes the film extremely accessible.

Notably, there is no ‘picking favourites’ in the framing: no predictable villain/hero edits, and no detectable preference for the Australian contestant. The care that Kraskov has taken to present everyone equitably really shows, and the documentary is better for it.

As much as I wanted them all to win, we know early on that only one can be the very best in the world. We also know that they are all so very young, with non-fixed futures ahead of them, so their being crowned an Excel champion is not the be-all to end-all of their lives! But that’s not the perspective of these kids, all of whom have different reasons for being there:

Nam wants to make his mum proud; Alkmini wants to be a role model to other young women in STEM; Carmina wants to get into engineering and be a YouTube influencer; and De La Paix wants to prove to the world that people from Cameroon can do anything.

The tension is palpable by the time we get to the actual competition. The kids arrive and are given the low-down by the examiners, before testing their equipment and asking their remaining questions. Then, the contest starts. Never has a montage of kids staring at computer screens been more nail-biting!

Formulaic formulas in Spreadsheet Champions

The usual beats happen where they usually do: someone’s tech fails, someone’s stumped, someone’s soaring above the others, someone makes a critical error while the clock ticks away on screen. Smiles and laughter juxtapose with tears and frustration as these sheet freaks discover exactly how freaked their sheet is.

The documentary truly shines when it visualises, through overlaid graphics, what the kids are seeing and typing onto their screens. I’m a complete dunderhead at maths and even I understood (mostly) what was going on and the high-stakes nature of it all. My main takeaway? Excel starts to become inaccurate with its calculations after 15 digits, so you have to manually check the logic of the sum if using numbers beyond that. Facts!

Spreadsheet Champions also succeeds at depicting a niche world I had no idea existed. The very concept of an Excel competition being unheard of to me but meaning the entire world to many is an idea that I find really compelling.

It’s the sort of story that leaves you wondering about other subcultures and niche interests and whether a competition exists for every one of those (a ‘Cool S‘ drawing competition, anyone?).

Spreadsheet Champions is no masterpiece, but it’s still rather excel-lent.

Spreadsheet Champions is currently screening at MIFF, before heading to CinefestOZ for further showings and a limited theatrical run.

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