So you think you are an Excel guru with a ninja black belt skills? I hope you are! The good news is you could challenge the world and test your worth! There are few Excel contests that would give you the opportunity to do just that.
Recently I have participated in the annual Spreadsheet Guru contest organized by INFORMS and had a great opportunity to face the competition from around the world and test my skills against the best. It was very exciting experience. The emphasis of this competition is on speed and accuracy of solving the tasks. The second and the final third rounds are head-to-head competition.
I looked around another opportunity for testing your skills - this is the ModelOff competition. This one seems more exciting as it puts at test not only your speed but your wits with Excel as well. The tasks are clever and really challenging. See the tasks of the 2013 challenge here together with solutions and explanations. Give them a try. If your solution matches the best ones then you could go and participate this year. If not, you would have learner a lot cool and clever tricks in Excel. So you win either way. I learned a lot trying to solve the problems and had fun doing that.
Another great source for interesting challenges is one of my favorite sites - Chandoo.org. Learn more about the latest one here. At the bottom of the page there are links to previous contests. Not a competition but a great way to develop great skills for one are the homeworks on the website - go there and search for "homework".
I find competitions and challenges to be a great motivator and a fantastic way to improve my practical skills. I will keep looking around for other opportunities and I am even thinking of organizing one in my country. I will appreciate if you share with me about any similar competition.
I checked out the 2013 questions, and while I was able to work out some solutions, they were nowhere near as short as what these power users thought of!
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