Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

Excel people have the best team names.

14 Jul 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:03

In this short YouTube segment, Paul Barnhurst interviews a speaker about a classroom competition that uses an online Excel spreadsheet as a real‑time scoreboard. Students choose humorous leaderboard names for their teams, such as “Dim Early Fan Club,” “Ctrl+Alt+Defeat,” “Ctrl+Alt+Elite,” “Tough Sheet,” and “Knicks in 5.” The Excel sheet automatically aggregates answers and updates scores, allowing the class to track performance live. The conversation highlights how the gamified Excel leaderboard fosters student engagement, creativity, and a fun competitive atmosphere.

Chapters

What's the most memorable team name? You've shared several of them on LinkedIn. I know I've seen some fun ones from time to time. The students totally fit for college, have a lot of fun with coming up with your name.
Yeah, just for context, so what we do is we have a scoreboard that is up on the board and it's an online Excel sheet where all of their answers are feeding into it. And so we're tracking their scores in real time. And so the students get to pick their leaderboard name, right, for their teams. And so I think the first competition I did in the entire semester, the winning team, to pick the Dim Early Fan Club as their team name. And I thought that was pretty appropriate. And other fun ones, gosh, this is Excel. And so there's all sorts of fun things that you can do with Excel. So we would have things like Ctrl+Alt+Defeat, and then we would have Ctrl+Alt+Elite. One week we had Tough Sheet. That was kind of fun. Back in April, we all know what happened in June, but back in April I did have a team name that was Knicks in 5. So a little prophetic there. They had a lot of fun with those.