Congratulations to all the young people at the 15th annual Microsoft Office Specialist World Championships held earlier this month in Orlando, FL.
The event pits 13- to 22-year-olds from around the world to test their skills in Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This years winners are:
- Lai Tin Ming, age 16, Hong Kong, Word 2013
- Georgi Boshev, age 18, Bulgaria, Word 2010
- Ryan Catalfu, age 17, United States, PowerPoint 2013
- Ka Hei Chao, age 17, Macau, PowerPoint 2010
- Pak Hei Lee, age 18, Hong Kong, Excel 2013
- Kuan Hou Lei, age 16, Macau, Excel 2010
Hong Kong and Macau seem to be hotbeds of MS Office expertise and probably in Chinese as well as English (maybe some Portuguese too), impressive.
Source: Certiport. (Office Watch would like to properly credit these winners. Sadly the supplied photos haven’t been captioned with names)
Entry is automatic when someone does the Microsoft Office Specialist exam in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint (2010 or 2013) as arranged by Certiport or one of their regional partners. The company claims there were 700,000 unique entrants this year, which seems an unreasonably high number to us (perhaps some double and triple counting involved? One ‘entry’ per exam?)
Then there’s regional competitions before the finalists get to compete in Orlando.
The competition comprises Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents that the competitors have to recreate in 50 minutes.
There are separate competitions for Office 2010 and Office 2013 programs. Strangely, Office 2016 isn’t used for the testing even though the education licensing for Office encourages use of Office 2016.
Winners from the Office 2010 rounds get a lower cash prize than the Office 2013 winners.
Next year, the finals will be in Anaheim, California where the finalists can visit Disneyland instead of Disneyworld.
