Spreadsheet Champions
(Australia, 86 min.)
Dir. Kristina Kraskov
Programme: Special Presentations
There are innumerable films of late that follow young people as they engage in some sort of competitive challenge. 2002’s Spellbound helped set the formula, with 2023’s Pianoforte following its lead, while the likes of Boys State from 2020 (and subsequently 2024’s Girls State) illustrated that even outside the sports-like motifs, there were profound things to learn about the competitive nature of young people across different arenas.
It’s in this environment that Kristina Kraskov’s brisk but slight documentary Spreadsheet Champions finds itself situated, focusing on an even more surreal mode of competition involving youths from around the world seeking to be crowned champion of Microsoft Excel.
The film’s ambitions are noteworthy, and its global scope is part of its charm. Focussing on six young people from places including Greece, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cameroon, Australia, and the U.S.A., these bright individuals are all regional champions. They fly to Orlando to compete in the Olympics of spreadsheet nerdiness, looking to excel at Microsoft Excel.
Despite this rich fodder for both drama and human interest, there are a couple checks against this film. For one, while a spelling competition, a musical performance, or even the travails of a virtual political campaign are easily understood, the actual elements of making a competitive arena for spreadsheeting are opaque at best and downright obfuscated at worst. The quizmaster (fittingly named Bing, given the Microsoft connection) talks about having to make more challenging tests year over year, but we never see the results save for a few simulated versions provided by the film’s motion graphics team.
Furthermore, while talking heads interviews discuss over and over how these people are the future thanks to their creative understanding of data presentation that is vital to future careers demanding such skill sets, audiences are simply told this fact rather than shown it. It’s as if we’re to take all this enthusiasm as gospel. There’s nothing fundamentally sporting about Excel, even for the more advanced users, nor is it obvious how knowing what year the software was developed provides a transferable skill, save for joining a local pub trivia team when they age out of this particular event.
It’s always a challenge for filmmakers to find the right subject to follow, of course, not knowing in advance who will thrive and who will crash out. That being said, the fact that the lead subjects of Spreadsheet Champions are (spoiler alert!) are, at best, also-rans makes the stories of the eventual winners feel even more distant, especially as we have zero way of attesting who did what, and how their victories were adjudicated. A missed note, a wrongly spelled word, or a slip up during a campaign speech, are obvious to all, no matter whether you already have a contestant to root for. Here, we’ve got a bunch of stories of young and ambitious kids travelling to far-flung places, overcoming challenges either psychological or socio-economic, and given exactly zero insight into what it is that they’re doing right or wrong compared to their peers.
The actual Olympics is filled with sports that few care about, but even viewers oblivious to the vagaries of a given activity are able and quickly to see what makes a winner versus an athlete who comes up short. Here, in the world of spreadsheet battles, there’s no insight to be had save for the tense music employed to make dramatic the sight of a bunch of young people squinting at their laptop screens trying to make sense of digital gibberish.
There are some fun ingredients that are explored in part, including the notion of the contestants wanting to bring their own keyboards. But having to have them vetted to ensure nothing nefarious should occur!) One particularly dramatic moment occurs when a system crashes, the participant not saving her work despite many admonishments to do so. The rules are bent, and she’s able to continue.
And it’s here that an even more cynical element is brought to mind. Part of the process of padding out the film involves discussing the development of the spreadsheet software in the earliest days of personal computing, discussing Visicalc and its implementation on the early Apple devices. No mention is given to how Apple lost this business market with Microsoft’s massive push in that area, or how Lotus 123 was trouncing both Visicalc and Microsoft’s own Multiplan (developed for CP/M based systems). The story of Excel’s dominance itself is one of great competitive risk and corporate shenanigans, and it’s ignored entirely in this telling.
Even more comical is the fact that Excel is now under serious pressure from cloud-based options like Google’s Sheets. While less robust in some manners, the fact that it works within a web browser means that the very thing we see occur, a participant losing her work because of a system crash, would have been impossible if they were operating under this cloud setup. Even simply using Office 365’s version would have been under the same auto-save protocol.
Yes, these are minor quibbles, but it shows that by focusing on the kids and their opaque competition, we’re left wanting more details. Moreover, by avoiding the larger storylines about how these tools have evolved and shaped our handling of data save for some very minor platitudes, the design makes for, at best, an innocuous film with some charismatic kids, and, at worst, a film as forgettable as the questions the kids are asked to answer.
Spreadsheet Champions may have all the points to make a truly great competition film, but all the cells don’t add up. In the end, we’ve got a mishmash of ideas never coalescing. While it makes for an audience-friendly glimpse into this world, it barely lives up to the complexity of both the challenge and the remarkable character of the participants.
