To get students from varying majors involved with the athletics department, Elizabethtown College recently announced plans to introduce a new Microsoft Excel sport to their athletic line-up. The event would consist of races wherein participants had to accomplish specific tasks in Excel quickly and efficiently and is intended for computer science majors.
The college was initially inspired by official Microsoft Excel tournaments. Tournaments like the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) run annual tournaments for people to race each other in efficient Microsoft Excel usage. However, the organizers of this new sport found themselves incredibly intimidated by some of the events seen throughout the tournament’s lifespan. As such, they decided to make unique challenges for their tournament instead of figuring out what was happening during the FMWC.
Initial preparations were hindered by technical issues. The person in charge of writing up the rules on a Microsoft Word document accidentally added a line halfway through the document and couldn’t figure out how to delete it. The IT department came in to figure out the issue, but everyone involved agreed the best course of action would be to delete the entire document and start over. This incident delayed the first round of the college’s tournament by a week and a half.
Another challenge facing the tournament organizers was the prevalence—or lack thereof—of Microsoft Office. Some people who expressed interest in the event asked if it was acceptable to use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Despite their insistence that they basically do the same things, they were banned from entering the tournament. This severely cut down on the number of participants.
Some computer science majors were also not very enthusiastic about the event. One student interviewed for their thoughts on the event did nothing but laugh extremely hard for an extended period. The student was still laughing as we wrapped up interviews for the day. Another interview went poorly as the interviewer started by asking, “What do you think about Microsoft Excel as a branch of computer science?” This prompted the student to mime vague threats towards the interviewer before leaving. We’re 60% certain that the student was pretending to poke the interviewer in the eyes.
Despite this, a trial run of the sport was held anyway. Unfortunately, the event almost immediately hit a blockade. While creating problems in Microsoft Excel, someone accidentally made a typo in one of the equations. This typo caused a severe error wherein if someone solved the problem, Excel failed to process the answer to such an extent that the program would crash. Others involved with the trial event reported everything from their entire computer crashing to one allegedly catching on fire.
While the event’s future does not look nearly as bright as the fires it started, the organizers involved have remained steadfast during these rough first few days. They believe that with enough time and patience and probably several thousand dollars—to pay for damages caused by fires—they can calculate a way to make this sport one of the best on the campus.
