Hilary Smart beats Alex Gordon in Excel Championships

December 09, 2013 - by Bill Jelen

New York – It was the second year for the ModelOff Financial Modelling championships and sixteen finalists competed head to head at Bloomberg on December 8, 2013. After four grueling hours, Hilary Smart was crowned the new ModelOff World Champion.

Hilary is a 26-year old senior consultant at Operis in London. She wins US $30,000 and said she would use the money for travel, having recently been married.

Last year’s champion, Alex Gordon finished second.

The winners were announced at Microsoft’s Manhattan offices Sunday afternoon. Four teams of finalists competed in four rounds of Excel Golf, trying to get the shortest formula to solve four particular problems. The Australia/New Zeeland team won this event, sharing a $4000 prize. I’ll note that Excel MVP Bob Umlas was in the audience and twice offered formulas that were shorter than the winning formula. Unfortunately, since Bob was not competing, all he won were more bragging rights.

Over the course of the weekend, the finalists toured the Bloomberg offices, and spent an afternoon with five project managers from the Excel team in Redmond, offering suggestions for future versions of Excel.

I was able to shoot several podcasts with finalists and others attending ModelOff. These will be rolled out over the coming weeks in this blog.