Glide has always been all about the spreadsheet. Our team, our customers, and our Experts might all self-describe as spreadsheet enthusiasts and problem-solvers to their cores. That’s what got us so excited when we learned there was a film in production about the Microsoft Excel World Championships happening in Las Vegas (that two of our team members attended and which Glide will be an official sponsor of for the 2026 season).
I sat down with Brian Pawloski and Paul Camarata, the executive producers of A Billion to One, The Excel World Championship Documentary, to hear all about the filmmaking process, the wild scene at the Vegas finals, and what they think makes the spreadsheet such a fertile battleground for competitors and Excel geeks alike. The film was brought to life by the creative leadership of the two directors, Rich Owens and Tom Van Kalken.
Glide is sponsoring the 2026 Excel World Championships
Read about itWhat is “A Billion to One”?
Here’s what the filmmakers have to say about the movie: “A Billion to One' is a documentary about one of the most unexpected battlegrounds in modern competition: Microsoft Excel. Each year, the best spreadsheet minds from around the globe gather to battle it out in a high-octane, formula-fueled showdown to determine who will be the Excel World Champion.
The Finals take place under the bright lights of Las Vegas, complete with hype tunnels, walk-on music, and a live audience. But this film isn’t just about what happens under the glittering lights of Downtown Vegas; it’s about celebrating obsession, talent, and the universal hunger to be the best at something—anything.
Styled like a true sports documentary, 'A Billion to One' brings out the quirks, rituals, rivalries, and nerves of competition—but through a lens of warmth and genuine admiration. Because once you see Excel the way they do, you’ll never look at a spreadsheet the same way again.”
Here’s the interview.
March 2026: Interview with filmmakers Brian Pawloski and Paul Camarata
Wren Noble
First off, I’m so excited to watch the film. Before getting more involved in the Excel World Championships this past year, I’d had no idea that this huge, competitive, really worldwide community existed. Tell me about Excel esports. What are players competing in?
Brian Pawloski
It’s mainly timed problem-solving within puzzles that are designed in Excel.
That’s really the first thing that struck me, the puzzles, which I’d never seen done before in Excel. The first time you see a puzzle, like Mahjong or a map, and you can manipulate it just by using keystrokes and Excel, it really blows your mind. I knew it was powerful. I knew I could do, like, a V-lookup, but I didn't know there were all these deeper layers to what was possible.
Paul Camarata
Yeah. I mean, there's all the literature about the primal instinct to solve puzzles. There's this really interesting book, it's a graphic novel called “Tetris: The Games People Play” by Box Brown. In it, the artist traces the idea that if you go back to the Stone Age, humanity has always been creating games and solving puzzles. There's something in our DNA that drives us to solve puzzles, overcome challenges, and face the emotional triggers that come with that. I think puzzles are just baked into who we are as humans.
Wren Noble
That makes a lot of sense. I think one of the things that often strikes people when they hear about the Championships is that it’s Excel, a spreadsheet program most people know but see as a boring, stodgy work tool, yet people are getting incredibly hyped about it. What is it about spreadsheets that inspires this level of enthusiasm?
Brian Pawloski
I think spreadsheets provide clarity and understanding. People are searching for that. When you have massive amounts of information, when you have some type of puzzle to solve, I think that you're looking for clarity and understanding, and the spreadsheet does that for you. It provides form.
Paul Camarata
You know, most people understand that if the internet shuts down, the world sort of stops, at least temporarily, until it comes back up, right? The same or more can be said for Microsoft Excel. If Microsoft Excel stops, business, technology, all of it stops. It's very much this utility layer, almost like electricity. If it goes away, all the things above it start to go away as well.
I didn't know any of this, but the way the people we interviewed at the Championships spoke about it, so universally and similarly, it really felt like it's more of a fact than an opinion. That was my takeaway.
Brian Pawloski
Using Excel in this new way is both novel and familiar. You're immediately drawn into a new layer of a program that you already know really well.
I think the other piece is the highly competitive nature of it and the ways in which these people were really engaging personalities. They’re already celebrities in these spaces. As a filmmaker, when you get to step into another community for the first time and meet its celebrities, it's incredibly interesting to see.
For me, that was meeting Michael Jarman for the first time. I’d just learned he existed, and he was already such a prominent figure in the Excel esports scene, and also this fierce competitor. It was just very in your face. It was like, “Whoa, that’s some fierce spreadsheet right there.”
“That's some fierce spreadsheet right there.”
Paul Camarata
There's a phrase, “when you find your passion, you find your people.” I think that this community speaks to that for me.
I think every one of them self-described as the Excel geek in their business. It helped their career. They were the one go-to person. Initially, it was part of their intellectual interests, maybe their livelihood, their career, but then— to Brian's point—they took it into this entirely new space, and suddenly it’s so much bigger than just them and their job. It’s a passion, it’s a whole community.
It's like you have a chainsaw and you’re cutting wood with it, and then one day you realize you can sculpt ice with it. Everything changes.
When we were doing interviews, people kept saying things like, “I found out there were people out there like me.” So many of them told similar stories. When you don't know it, it looks like it's just something on a computer screen, but to them, it's so much more.
Then seeing this community convene in Las Vegas was another level entirely. The competitors live all over the world and, for the most part, commune and convene digitally. But then, in this one week, they all come into the same physical space, build in-person relationships, and have the chance to be so connected with each other.
It was a really cool thing to see, very emotional. We got to witness these people feeling really fulfilled, engaged, inspired, challenged, and rewarded through these relationships that all come through the spreadsheet, right? Again, it's a spreadsheet. But it's so much more than a spreadsheet.
Brian Pawloski
To build on that, the Financial Modeling World Cup has been going on for like 15 years, or even longer. The people who did like the financial side of things have been around competing for a while, and that’s a very intense competition. But the Microsoft Excel world championship has this joy factor. It's not just competing to see who's the smartest person in the room. It's a competition to see who can solve a really clever puzzle that we all get at the same time. And I think that has allowed for the personalities that are really the connective tissue of the whole scene. It’s the ones that help each other.
Like Diarmuid Early, who won this year. He’d never won before. People never thought he was going to win. And part of that was because he always gave away his best information. People would say he was the smartest in the room, but he gives everyone his newest, best stuff, so everyone just beats him on game day.
And then he finally won. And the minute the crown was on his head, the way that everyone who had been eliminated before, who had been so sad, head in hands, suddenly, as soon as Diarmuid won, everyone was overjoyed. They all had the night of their life.
And so to see that happen, I see it as being very countercultural in ways. These people are all over the world. And then they come together and cheer each other on, and it is technology that united them.
And then they spent like five days with each other in Utah after the competition, just to celebrate.
Wren Noble
Tell me about getting invited to this post-championship get-together.
Brian Pawloski
Yeah. They had a retreat in Utah, and Filmmakers Tom and Rich went up there with them to film. It was great.
I think it speaks volumes to the work that Rich and Tom did to develop a really respectful, honest, and open relationship with this community. They were invited very early on to come up with them to Utah, and they were able to capture what ended up being a really critical part of the film, which is the end of the physical gathering for the year.
And after the competition, these guys will continue to stay in touch regularly in the Excel esports forums. I’m in these WhatsApp groups they created that are blowing up all the time with messages. So they are all still really heavily connected.
Wren Noble
The competitors came from all over the world, right?
Brian Pawloski
Oh yeah. Madagascar, New Zealand, Portugal, Australia, England, India, Latvia….all across Europe. Madagascar is strangely a hotbed. The University of Arizona has a really strong collegiate program.
There’s something language-agnostic about Excel, too. I feel like that helps unite people from all over. Sort of in the way that mathematics can unite people who are from all corners of the world. They communicate through this platform.
Wren Noble
Someone described the championships as being like the Super Bowl. Tell me about the scene in Las Vegas. What was it like?
Brian Pawloski
I mean, the championship night was packed. It was standing room only. It was truly a Vegas Event, green carpet and everything. There were announcers, different video performances, dance performances, music, DJs, a competitor's back room, and VIP spaces. It was also the 40th anniversary of Excel, so they had a major presence, which we were happy to document.
Paul Camarata
I mean, they actually did a parade down the Vegas strip! The first night, as one of their opening events, culminating in an opening ceremony.
They gathered hundreds of Excel competitors from all over the world, had a few large banners they doled out to the standard bearers, and paraded out of the hotel and down the strip for like 10 blocks, just announcing themselves. It’s no different than any other sports event, like the Rose parade before the Rose Bowl.
This story really has every element of a great competition story. It has the sports documentary aspect, the human community story, the global travel aspects, and then other subtexts; the rise of e-gaming is a big theme.
Brian Pawloski
We really came at this as a proper sports documentary. We saw this as being basically like a Hard Knocks of Excel spreadsheets.
And I say that because Paul Camarata was a showrunner of Hard Knocks when he was at NFL Films. Rich, who is one of the two directors, had worked with Paul Camarata at NFL Films, and he ended up introducing us to this whole thing.
So that’s the perspective we brought to it. We had the all-access aspect of it, the behind-the-scenes footage, the ability to be able to be intimately connected to all these people from around the world; we were able to create a story that is living and breathing every single year in Las Vegas.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime story to be able to capture Diarmuid Early's ascension and ultimately winning of the championship last year.
Wren Noble
So your background is in professional sports filmmaking. What made you want to get on board with a film about spreadsheets?
Paul Camarata
When I learned that a billion people worldwide use Excel every day, that was all it took to get me interested in this project. Because what it tells me is that it's ubiquitous. I immediately wanted to learn more about it.
I had obviously heard of Microsoft Excel, but I had no idea, really, what it could be used for, or what it was capable of. From an audience perspective, I knew this story could be revelatory. It could enlighten a lot of people. We didn't really need to build an audience in some ways. The audience was there. That made me immediately say, “I'm interested, let's talk more about it.”
Wren Noble
If someone's watching your film or reading this interview and gets really excited about the idea of competitive Excel, they actually participate, right? They can throw their hat in the ring for the 2026 Championships?
Brian Pawloski
Absolutely! The qualifying rounds have started and they’re open to anyone. You can join the games at the Microsoft Excel Esports website. And I think there are a lot of local communities as well.
I know Celia Alvez, one of the competitors who also works at Sheetcast, is up in Toronto. They have well over a thousand competitors up in the Toronto chapter alone.
It’s funny, one of my friends was up in Buffalo a couple of weeks ago at the big sports bar next to the hockey arena, and Microsoft Excel eSports was playing on the big screen. It's just starting to catch on, which is really interesting. About 50 million people engaged with the championship week this year, in person, online on YouTube, and across various platforms. That's crazy to me. And it’s only getting bigger.
Wren Noble
So the film doesn’t come out for another few months at least, but in the meantime, is there anywhere else we can watch your content?
Brian Pawloski
The best place to watch is on the PanCam Pictures YouTube.
The stuff that we have so far is really good. We've released a couple of shorts on YouTube. One was on Lorenzo Foti from Italy. That was a great little piece on him and his competitive athletic spirit spilling over into Excel. And then we have a few more that we're working on, and we'll start releasing them piecemeal as we get people excited about the feature.
We are now in the final stages of the editing process. There is still some shooting to do to fill in gaps, but the majority of the production is complete, and we're now in post-production.
We’re expecting it to be done this upcoming fall and to premiere in New York City. I look forward to everyone being there with us.
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