Press & media kit for Big Excel Energy.

Short bio. Joshua Cottrell-Schloemer is the creator of Big Excel Energy and the Excel + Design newsletter. He is a 3× Microsoft Excel MVP who helped popularize Excel as a serious visual design medium.

Long bio. Joshua Cottrell-Schloemer is a data communications designer and the creator of Big Excel Energy and the free weekly Excel + Design newsletter, where every issue includes a beautifully designed, ready-to-use Excel template. A 3× Microsoft Excel MVP, he reaches 485,000+ followers on TikTok as @bigexcelenergy, has 19,000+ newsletter subscribers, and his Excel templates have been downloaded nearly one million times (figures as of August 2026). Before Big Excel Energy, he cofounded Market.space, a competitive-intelligence platform he started in 2014 that was acquired in 2016. Today he helps brands and startups make their data matter through communication, psychology, and design, and has helped Fortune 500 brands. He is one of the earliest creators to build a large audience specifically around Excel as a visual design medium.

The 400-video TikTok forensics. When Josh's TikTok channel went from millions of views to hundreds with no explanation from the platform, he pulled every analytics metric available for all 400 videos - 150+ columns of data, retention curves, thumbnail classification - and worked the problem until the pattern showed up. Then he used what he found to revive the account. He can speak to: what the data actually said, why audiences pause on a video, and what creators can and cannot reverse-engineer about an algorithm.

Renting your audience from the algorithm. Josh grew a TikTok audience of 485K+ followers on a consistent formula of crazy Excel dashboards and cute cats, then learned the hard way that he didn't own access to that audience - he was renting it from the algorithm, and the algorithm can evict you whenever it wants. Nearly one million free Excel files and tens of millions of views did not pay the bills. He can speak to: platform dependence, what a following is actually worth, and why he moved his work to channels he owns.

Excel as a design medium. Josh has been publishing original work that treats Excel as a serious visual design medium since 2019, and the arc from early articles to first videos to conference teaching to three Microsoft Excel MVP awards is documented with dated sources on the archive page. His argument is simple: people have organized their thinking on a grid since 3000 BCE, and design is what decides whether a report actually gets used. He can speak to: why ugly dashboards don't get used, what a spreadsheet looks like when someone designs it on purpose, and the evidence behind "one of the earliest documented Excel design creators."

Testing AI on real work, every day. Josh tests AI tools against real Excel and data-communication work daily, and his read cuts against both the hype and the dismissal: in his corner of the data world, the last two years brought a bigger leap in what's possible than the previous ten, and the last ten percent is still design. When recruiters working with one of the two big AI brands asked him to review its Excel output, he decided he'd rather give his work away than watch any single brand own it. He can speak to: what holds up in daily practice, what's still hype, and why he's betting on open access over exclusivity.

For interviews, quotes, speaking, or asset requests, email Josh directly.