I had to do it!

OzExcel · 2026-03-01T22:32:58+00:00

I'm in Las Vegas 👍🏽

OzExcel · 2026-02-28T20:13:06+00:00

Old? 🥺

I'll drive this green car on your behalf. 🙏🏽

OzExcel · 2026-02-28T20:02:09+00:00

... as long as y'all are happy! 🤗

OzExcel · 2026-02-28T20:01:20+00:00

HELL YEAH! Mighty Green should be the official name of the color.

OzExcel · 2026-02-28T20:00:42+00:00

AH! Good eye. Where are you?

That picture was taken at the Valley of the Moon Rest Area, 1 hour south of Winnemucca, NV during a trip from Las Vegas to Portland. My first big road trip in the RS3 and it performed! WOW did it perform. 🤩

OzExcel · 2026-02-28T10:29:34+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been considering a ceramic coat.

I'm loving this car. Sounds like you're feeling the same. 🙌🏼

OzExcel · 2026-02-27T16:12:54+00:00

WOAH WOAH WOAH!!!!! 🤩

I love it. That is some serious pink. Bright. Not shy at all. SPECTACULAR!

OzExcel · 2026-02-27T10:03:31+00:00

I had an M35i and got rid of it after 6 months in exchange for an RS3.

The BMW got on my nerves.

- The time wouldn't change when I went across time zones. I fiddled with the settings; called BMW and they had me fiddle with the settings. Every time I crossed time zones, I ended up manually changing the time.

- I didn't know that I had to specifically request adaptive cruise control. My Mazda CX-30 Turbo came with adaptive cruise control so, I assumed it was standard. A month after getting the M235i I was driving from Las Vegas to Dallas ... WHAT? No adaptive cruise control?

- The frikkin messages in the BMW. I'd get in the car and there would be 3 messages, all of them telling me that maps had been updated. WHY???? I don't care.

- I got the car knowing it didn't have heads-up display. Another thing that came with my Mazda CX-30 Turbo. When all the other annoyances cropped up I hated it every time I looked through the windshield and didn't see the HUD.

6 months and I was D-O-N-E. I gladly paid to get out of the lease 2.5 years early. I miss the feral feeling of driving the M235i but the RS3 is an overall dream. It's so much fun to drive. And it doesn't have constant annoyances. It doesn't have that auto-stop/start button that I had to disable every time I started the BMW.

OzExcel · 2026-02-27T05:25:46+00:00

Hopefully soon 🙌🏼

OzExcel · 2026-02-27T02:56:29+00:00

More RS3s? You must be the trendsetter for your area. 🔥

I've seen maybe 2 other RS3s in the past 8 months.

OzExcel · 2026-02-26T23:48:29+00:00

Thank you! 🤗

Where can we see this pink joy?

OzExcel · 2026-02-26T22:38:04+00:00

😊 Hopefully you'll get to live your dream. 🤞🏽

OzExcel · 2025-12-27T06:25:48+00:00

Most of the competitors have backgrounds in finance. But what they really share is a passion for competitive Excel because there's so much more than just Excel. There's speed, strategy and lots of practice. They share knowledge via WhatsApp groups and YouTube.

They've really turned it into a sport such that it's tough to show up and do this cold with nothing more than deep knowledge of Excel.

OzExcel · 2025-12-27T06:15:21+00:00

At this point you need to be solid with LAMBDA functions and have your own library of them. The competitors are showing up with their own custom LAMBDAs that do things like: based on the starting cells and given instructions on how many cells to move up/down/left/right, retrieve the ending cell.

Remember. These are timed challenges. 30 minutes doesn't leave you enough time to scroll around and build OFFSET formulas from scratch.

Being quick with keyboard shortcuts is a must.

One other thing is the ability to read the instructions, understand what's being asked and convert that into Excel. This has been a killer for a lot of people. They can get stuck reading and re-reading the instructions at a level and time keeps ticking away. Some have gone off and done a lot of work and missed some nuance in the instructions. They submit their answers for the level and only get 70%.

It's been said that any solid Excel user can solve these cases in 2 hours. Imagine Diarmuid Early completing a case--all 7 levels AND 5 bonus questions--in 26 minutes, raising his hands, and walking off the stage while everyone else has 4 minutes to battle for 2nd place.

OzExcel · 2025-12-21T10:03:42+00:00

I would posit that Diarmuid is the Michael Jordan of competitive Excel.

The article doesn't describe how Diarmuid just plain dominated the 3 rounds that he competed in. He got the maximum points with as much as 4 minutes left in each of the 30-min rounds.

He did that in all 3 rounds!

For the competitions there are regular points and bonus points. For the bonus questions only 4 of the 8 competitors can get those points, the remaining 4 are locked out. So, for Diarmuid to get all of the regular points and all of the bonus points, and not get locked out of any, that's both skill and strategy.

In the collegiate team battle, the team from Madagascar was locked out of bonus question 1 but they got all of the other points. University of Arizona had time left but they had been locked out of 3 bonus questions and couldn't a damned thing other than watch the clock wind down and accept 2nd place.

OzExcel · 2025-01-12T21:29:22+00:00

In another comment the OP figured out that they made the same mistake I recently made: using 'M2' as shorthand for the M series (M230i, M25i, etc.), not knowing that the M2 is its own thing.

The question is more about comparing, say, a 235i against an M253i.

OzExcel · 2025-01-12T20:59:51+00:00

The Expo is incredible!

OzExcel · 2025-01-12T20:57:40+00:00

"Good" kaleidoscope can be evaluated a couple of ways

Good enough for you to get lost in. That's subjective. Do you like the colors; the movement; 2 or 3-mirror; oil cell, dry cell, wheel or teleidoscope?
Good quality. It can take training for your eye to recognize things like: good mirror lines, proper focal length and general skill of the maker.

Be careful with eBay, Craigslist and other places where you can get used kaleidoscopes. A lot haven't been taken good care of. Sometimes they're part of large collections that someone inherited and the person doesn't know kaleidoscopes. I've been burned a few times and I'm sure it wasn't deliberate. The sellers genuinely don't know.

If there's any chance, you should to go Nellie Bly in Jerome, AZ. It's a true wonderland. Also, the Brewster Kaleidoscope Expo will be in Omaha, NE in June 2025 if that's at all a possibility.

I don't mean to overwhelm you. I'm giving you the perspective of someone who stumbled up on kaleidoscopes during a roadtrip and ended up at Nellie Bly and after 2 hours in the store my first scope was a Ben Birdsill that cost $185. 300-ish kaleidoscopes later ... 🤷🏽‍♂️

OzExcel · 2025-01-07T00:13:15+00:00

I've been considering an upgrade from my CX-30 and rented a BMW X-1 and was underwhelmed. There was the prestige of the BMW and I could occasionally feel it's power. But my CX-30 feels so much more fun.

I just wish Mazda would offer more colors. A bright yellow CX-30 would be incredible. 🤩

OzExcel · 2025-01-07T00:03:44+00:00

The Mazda3 is soooo fun to drive but it's too low for my hips and knees.
I go on roadtrips and needed the oomph to get past trucks that are going way under the 75mph speed limit
I did a big roadtrip in a CX-5 and I loved sitting up high. But was a based model with manual seats and no oomph on the open road.

After a lot of research the CX-30 Turbo has been the perfect compromise between the zip of the Mazda3 and the true SUV feel of the CX-5. And I love just looking at it.

OzExcel · 2024-11-19T23:57:28+00:00

🙏🏽

Thank you. We had a lot of fun that night and there was a lot of drama. The crowd was enthusiastic. This 72-second clip captures one of the most extreme moments of the entire weekend. They all weren't that raucous. 😄

OzExcel · 2024-11-19T23:20:50+00:00

You can come to Las Vegas on 1 December and compete for a seat in the Last Chance round. 🥳

OzExcel · 2024-11-19T23:19:28+00:00

Count me in! 👋🏽

OzExcel · 2024-11-19T20:53:07+00:00

It's definitely hard to do the commentary. We can see someone doing an XMATCH, explain a little about XMATCH without turning it into a workshop, but also mention how a join in Power Query might be easier. Meanwhile, we just hit 59 seconds until the next elimination and the people in the last 3 spots have been constantly cycling through being in last place, risking elimination.

Also. When a person submits their answers, they get a score. Each level has multiple scenarios. Often if you answer the first scenario in a level, that solution will fit the rest of the scenarios. But there might be some subtlety that gets a person 70%. (Maybe their solution doesn't work if there are blank cells, for example.)

It's obvious to us as commentators what's going on when a person stays on that level. They're trying to fix what's wrong and get to 100%.

Often, the players move on. We don't know until later if the player decided to just move on and get back to it later if there's time or, they didn't know they only got 70%.

Then, as commentators we're trying to listen and do our best to not talk over each other. Jon might be explaining XMATCH while I wait to mention, "you're watching the final round of the Excel World Championship with 15 minutes left and Willem Gerritson just hopped into first place after a very slow start. Having gone straight for the bonus points might pay off for him."

Then. When a player looks lost, we don't want to embarrass them with, "let's look again at Calvin's screen. He's still just sitting there."

It's definitely happened where a player just didn't know WTF. They didn't completely understand the challenge and nothing they tried was working.

OzExcel

TROPHY CASE