A British teenage girl has been named World Champion user of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software after winning a global competition.
Rebecca Rickwood, 15, from Cambridgeshire, clinched the win ahead of 228,000 international rivals.
The 79 finalists in the “2011 Worldwide Competition on Microsoft Office” battled it out this week in San Diego, California. Rebecca took first prize in the Excel 2007 category.
“It’s amazing. I didn’t think I’d win it,” she said.
“First we had to take a qualifying exam which I took back in about October. Then at the end of June we got the phone call saying I’d got the best score in the UK so I was coming to San Diego for the world championships.”
Rebecca, a GCSE student at Sawtry Community College in Cambridgeshire, won despite pitched against much older Excel users. Her mother is a Microsoft trainer at the school.
She was also the only winner from outside Asia. The four other Excel, Word and PowerPoint categories were won by competitors from China, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan. They participated in timed tests to demonstrate their ability to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
“There’s a lot of Asians here and usually they’re the ones who get all the top prizes, so I didn’t think that I would” said Rebecca.
The teenager, who would like to do "something to do with computing" when she leaves school, takes home home a $5,000 prize.
“I play flute so I’m going to buy myself a new flute,” she said. -05 Aug 2011