For many people, Microsoft Excel is to be avoided at all costs.
Maybe you lied about being “proficient” with the spreadsheet program to pad out your résumé and have lived in fear of being found out ever since. Or it could be that you do have a grasp on a few basic formulas but find the interface too labyrinthine to truly master.
Still, like it or not, Excel remains an integral part of businesses, with Microsoft claiming “hundreds of millions” of users worldwide. But for a thriving community of content creators, Excel’s uses go far beyond practicality. They live for the thrills of ninja-like Excel efficiency, and they’re happy to impart their esoteric knowledge to those brave enough to seek it out. They amass huge fandoms by demonstrating their flair for unexpected productivity hacks and posting record times on “obstacle runs,” with some even competing in official Excel championships for prize money (and bragging rights).
Vying for spreadsheet glory is just part of the fun, however. At the end of the day, everyone really wants to help each other get better.
Dan Kidney, 32, in London, tells WIRED he “accidentally” leveled up his Excel skills while working as an insurance data analyst and building his own ecommerce company from scratch, though he never expected to teach others the tricks he’d picked up in that time.
“I decided to start using my spare time to post on TikTok as an experiment during a planned employment break,” he explains, first sharing videos covering the Excel functions a beginner should know. A few weeks in, Kidney posted footage of himself racing through the varied challenges of an Excel obstacle course he’d designed himself—and engagement suddenly exploded, pushing the clip to 1 million views within days. Commenters replied that he had completed each page before they’d even had time to read the instructions on it.
Today, Kidney has a combined 300,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok accounts, both called “Functional Excel,” and his speedruns have had a surprising impact beyond his own office. He says a schoolteacher in rural Germany saw his videos and assigned his students to practice Excel on his templates, leading to a class competition.
“Your Excel skills suck,” says Jonathan Tristan, a 29-year-old content creator known as “Your Finance Brother,” in a video recently posted to his TikTok and Instagram pages. Like other influencers in the space, Tristan, who is based in Los Angeles and was previously an investment banker, advocates for dispensing entirely with the mouse and relying only on a flurry of keyboard combination moves to navigate Excel. And he goes one step further: “Pop the F1 key off your keyboard,” he instructs his viewers.
Excel’s power users end up with “stylistic preferences,” Tristan says, and ditching the F1 key is an example of a choice that is both practical and something of a flex. “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 explains. The problem is that if you accidentally hit F1, which sits between those keys, it brings up a help menu, slowing down your work. (Plus, would a genuine operator ever need help?)
Tristan, who has shared his own impressive Excel speedruns, says he imparts this kind of wisdom to his approximately 700,000 followers because every minute counts when you’re working around the clock on Wall Street—going 10 percent faster if you spend 10 hours a day in Excel, he says, is the difference between “getting five hours of sleep versus six hours of sleep.”