Diarmuid Early did not just win the Microsoft Excel World Championship’s Landmark Battle. He won it the hard way, in public and outdoors, beating Andrew Ngai 1060 to 1020 in a 30-minute contest that turned spreadsheet mastery into a street-level obstacle course.

Early, who now resides in New York, took on the challenge while competing overlooking the Statue of Liberty, with opponents placed at other famous landmarks: Jaq Kennedy near Big Ben, Nicolas Micot at the Eiffel Tower, and Ngai overlooking Sydney Harbour. The setup was part of MEWC’s inaugural one-off “Landmark Battle” that forced four top competitors to work in the urban wild, dealing with weather, potentially flaky internet, and the very human problem of passers-by getting curious about what they were doing.

This was not a random gimmick. The Landmark Battle was co-sponsored by Asus, which provided ExpertBook Ultras and wireless portable second screens to each contestant. The entire conceit was inspired by modern work patterns, MEWC said, including how many professionals increasingly operate “across client sites, airports, cafés, co-working spaces, and remote locations, instead of behind a desk in an office.” In other words, the contest tried to stress the same messy conditions that show up when you take work out of a controlled office environment. That is a subtle shift in what “skills” mean, even for decision-makers who do not care about spreadsheets as a hobby.

MEWC’s format generally pits Excel experts against each other on complex problems designed in advance by other Excel experts. This specific Landmark Battle took inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, then dialed the theme into a seven-part puzzle. The contestants raced through the puzzle to decipher the fastest travel route for a group of spreadsheet-bound characters trying to mimic Phileas Fogg’s feat. Unlike typical competition settings, the “Landmark Battle” put each competitor into a different physical context and removed the competitive comfort blanket. They had only a cameraman and their laptop. More importantly, none of them were aware of opponents’ live scores, so Early could not adjust based on who was ahead in real time.

That last detail matters because it explains how the contest could end with a last-minute comeback. Early’s signature strategy, described by MEWC as “core-first, bonus-later,” is essentially a disciplined approach to puzzle-solving: solve the core challenges first, then return after completion to capture additional bonus questions. In a contest where you do not know how far behind or ahead you are, that strategy becomes less about reactive gambling and more about execution under uncertainty. Early’s final margin was 40 points, 1060 to 1020, after he took down Ngai. Kennedy and Micot filled out the back half of the chart, but the headline outcome was that the defending world champion finished by outscoring the rival at the exact moment when competitors needed to convert partial progress into final points.

For executives and board-level readers, the bigger story is what MEWC’s popularity signals about work, tools, and attention. The Register notes that while the competition goes back to 2021, it was a 2022 broadcast on ESPN that made competitive Excel a more watchable, “popular thing to watch.” That matters because it is not just a niche. In 2025, the world championship in Las Vegas included tasks like solving a jigsaw puzzle using Excel. And the 2022 ESPN event already included variety such as the spreadsheet platformer Modelario, plus challenges involving a yacht regatta and slot machine-style games. When a spreadsheet becomes content, the skills being rewarded are no longer only technical. They are also speed, problem decomposition, and the ability to operate reliably under imperfect conditions.

The Landmark Battle also lands on a familiar tension for modern workforces: remote execution versus controlled environments. The hardware distribution by Asus, the portable second screens, and the enforced outdoor setting echo how business systems fail when you pull them out of the office. From a second-order perspective, competitions like this can normalize the idea that tool proficiency includes handling network constraints, device differences, and the friction of working in public. That is the same reality most companies are living with, even if they are not calling it “Excel.” Meanwhile, qualifiers for the 2026 world championship are ongoing. Six of nine Road to Las Vegas qualifier matches have taken place so far, and Early has already won three of them, making him an early favorite. If you are on a product, operations, or talent team, that track record is a reminder: the people who win these formats tend to be the ones who treat structure as strategy, even when the environment fights back.