They beat rivals from China, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and
Thailand

TECH MAD By Ian Tan
tanyhi@sph.com.sg

FOR most people, Microsoft Word and Excel are just software that are used daily to get some work done.

But for these Singaporean teens, the ubiquitous office software became an arena to slug it out on a global scale.

Two polytechnic students were crowned world champions in the 2004 Microsoft Office Specialist Academic Competition held in Shanghai last week, beating rivals from China, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic student Lee Chee Yuan, 19, was so good at the word processing program Microsoft Word 2002 that he completed a 45-minute professional certification course in less than eight minutes.

Singapore Polytechnic graduate Lau Cher Han, 23, came up tops in the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel 2002, and both have won a free trip to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Two other 19-year-old students, Low Yi Yang from Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Wong Wei Ming from Temasek Polytechnic, came in second and third in the Word and Excel categories respectively.

Obviously, it was not just a matter of typing a letter or routine data entry.

Said Mr Lee: 'For the competition, random tasks would keep popping up and you had to do different tasks in Word like mail merge, creating table of contents, footnotes or formatting images.'

These are tasks many office employees do at their own time, but the contestants were being tested on both speed and accuracy.

Said Mr Low: 'We practised to the point where if you saw a certain word (in the question), you would know what needed to be done immediately.'

It became a click-fest where keyboards and computer mouses were being hit upon every second.

If you did not know all the keyboard shortcuts (like pressing 'Control-S' to save a file), you would be left behind in the virtual dust.

Mr Lee was so stressed that his hands were shaking during the competition and he missed clicking the mouse button several times.

He said: 'I would just complete a task and move on to the next one without checking. There were about 14 main questions, each one with multiple tasks to perform.'

OVERCOMING SCEPTICISM

The global competition is in its third year, and the students had to put
up with some scepticism from people back home.

Said Mr Lau: 'My parents' friends had used the old Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet in the 1980s, and they thought that program was very simple to use.

'So they would question how is it that I could end up representing Singapore in such an event.'

But was it not numbingly boring to practise for several hours daily on software that basically deals with data management?

The young men shrugged, and said that the motivation came from being able to represent their country and travel overseas.

Of course, the prizes were a huge draw.

Mr Lee and Mr Lau had already won a Tablet PC worth over $3,000 each during the regional rounds here, and the trip to Shanghai for the finals included a stay at the posh Ritz Carlton hotel.

And you can bet that they are true Microsoft Office evangelists. When asked whether they thought Office software had become too bloated (with many functions untapped) for consumers, the reaction was immediate.

Said Mr Low: 'That's why you need to go for the Microsoft certification course! 'If you are going to pay hundreds of dollars for a program, why do you only want to know 20 per cent of its functions?'

Source:
The New Paper (31 August 2004)