This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Excel Blog articles.
Excel has an amazing passionate community that helps us and Excel users in various ways. It pushes the product team to innovate in the right ways (via UserVoice), it helps train Excel newbies via Tech Community and it helps Excel experts become even more efficient. Many of our events and recent AMAs with thousands of participants are proof of the continuing fervor and engagement of this community.
One of our favorite community events is the annual ModelOff competition, that took place this past weekend in London. Every year thousands of Excel fans from around the world test and develop their financial modeling skills through ModelOff’s two rounds of innovative challenges. The Top 16 finalists from those rounds then battle in a live competition that tests speed, modeling theory, data and risk competence, and more—all on Excel.
This year was no exception, we saw some amazing participants and deep Excel expertise. One thing that was different from previous years however, was that the Top 6 rookie competitors (anyone who is 24 years old or younger) were invited to the final, along with 10 other finalists. This not only provided encouragement for young professionals to further develop critical Excel skills, build their networks, and earn professional credibility, it also helped enrich the competition itself with some newer, creative techniques, and fresh thinking.
We are absolutely thrilled with the outcome and congratulate Michael Jarman for being crowned the champion… again!
“It was an intense four hours of testing that really challenged everyone, but I’m jazzed to come out on top,” Jarman said. A hardy congratulations to Marc Wiseman and Paul Dent too, who took second and third, respectively.
All of us on the Excel team are committed to supporting and celebrating all Excel fans, from beginners to power users. We congratulate and thank again, all the ModelOff competitors for coming out to play and making the Excel user community as vibrant as it is. We encourage you to continue to engage with us and the community, whether through Tech Community, Twitter, or Facebook. We also hope you’ll submit your ideas for new features to our UserVoice site.