Shocked and curious at the same time, I found out a few days ago: There is a Powerpoint World Championship – the MOS World Championship.
And this news comes just now, when I have just said goodbye to the dream of becoming a competition professional with a skill set in any discipline …
About the MOS World Championship
The information I was able to gather on this topic is actually a bit sparse, which suggests that Microsoft and the organizer Certiport did not necessarily conceive the event around this Internet – Internet Explorer is technically not part of the Microsoft Office Suite. What I could find out:
- MOS stands for Microsoft Office Specialist
- There are not only PowerPoint battles, but competitors are also competing in Microsoft Word and Excel
- There appear to be different competition classes for 2013 and 2016 office products.
- The competition is aimed exclusively at students or pupils (here the translation student from English is not always clear) worldwide
(Now I am disappointed again that I probably won’t be a professional athlete after all). - Apparently the competition has been around for several years. In a report there was talk about 17 years (I could not verify that)
- The organizer Certiport is a company that specializes in training employees on MS Office products
The 2019 PowerPoint winner: 18-year-old Seth Maddox
I first became aware of the whole thing through an article about the Powerpoint winner from 2019. Seth Maddox is just 18 years old and comes from Alabama (USA).
Of course, one thinks impulsively:
The winner is an 18-year-old boy who has never had to design a red status report in green, or press a project with 24 streams into a thinkcell gantt chart?
However, considering that the competition is only intended for students / pupils worldwide, this impression is quickly put into perspective.
Videos: What kind of slides are they building?
I would have liked to show you some more videos of the competitions, but it seems that the final round is not really recorded. Or maybe the competition is not an event at all, but rather a submission with a later central award ceremony. You can only find promo trailers and prize giving videos.
If you were still looking forward to Powerpoint slides, I can quickly recommend my article: 15 Powerpoint Hacks for Design Noobs.
Suggestions for improvement for the upcoming MOS World Championship Event
Of course I was a little bit upset about the sparse web presence of the competition. Therefore here are my suggestions for improvement
- I would expect the event 2020 to be streamed on twitch in the same style as the FIFA eWorld Cup. (The audience does not necessarily have to cheer)
- Get a wikipedia entry or a subpage with numbers, dates, facts about the event.
- Record the final round works via video and upload them to youtube. Or share the final works on slideshare.
- Finally, I would suggest a few competition or weight categories, but these are not to be taken too seriously.
In order not to limit the competition to students and pupils anymore, I would need new competition classes. These could also be created with new goals. Here are a few examples:
- Consultant Powerpoint (Arrange all elements of a slide in a way that they show a positive development!)
- Professors and Lecturers Stand-Off (How many words fit on a Powerpoint slide at most)
- Brand-Manager Challenge (Send a .pptx via mail to external parties, which contains two custom company fonts)
- Designer Slam (Develop a Powerpoint form that must not be changed and does not fit anywhere)
- Graphic Artist Obstacle Course (Create a Powerpoint presentation that includes images and is smaller than 20MB)
- Vostandsassistenten Melt-Down (conversion of blurry handwritten scans into high-end C-Level presentations)
With this in mind: Share the article with someone you would have nominated for the Powerpoint World Championship.
