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Unusual (but cool!) Uses of Excel

Many of you who have been using Excel for a long time have most likely seen some of the creative, interesting, and rather unusual uses of Excel that people have conjured up.  I'm talking about things like writing the Pac-Man game completely in Excel, stuff you wouldn't expect to see in a critical business application like Excel, but thanks to the ingenuity of spreadsheet hackers we get to see how the power and flexibility of spreadsheets can be put to use.

I was reminded of this today when a colleague forwarded me this Slashdot article about someone who used Excel to create a 3D rendering engine (btw, this reminded me of a similar 3D animation engine written by a tester on our team that uses the new OfficeArt rendering platform in Excel 2007), and it got me wondering what other interesting uses have people come up with that I haven't seen before.

I've seen a quite a few of these in my time here on the Excel team (we've even posted a couple of our own - check out Conway's Game of Life and Memory), and I'm sure many of you have too.  So let's hear it!  Tell me about the interesting, crazy, weird, unusual and cool spreadsheets you've come across or built that you never thought you'd see in Excel.

This could be interesting.  :)

Posted: Thursday, March 06, 2008 1:41 PM by Joseph Chirilov

Comments

Ray Lee said:

Wow... Unbelievable!!! I think him who had made this code so crazy.. in excel?? instead of pixel, use cell. I wondered his effort made this code..

but I can't..possibly.. ^^;

again.. I wonder.. it's true..

# March 6, 2008 7:34 PM

arun.philip said:

I remember John Walkenbach had a bunch of different games - they were my first exposure to Excel VBA programming (Excel 7).

# March 7, 2008 4:45 AM

Ian Huitson said:

I'll submit my graphical Excel Mandelbrot with no VB Code.

http://www.ianeva.info/Excel_Diversions/Mandelbrot/Excel_Mandelbrot.html

Hui...

# March 7, 2008 7:14 AM

Colin Banfield said:

Check out Debbie Gewand's site on using Excel to create clipart.  Every clipart image you see on this site was done entirely in Excel (pre-2007).  Talk about a cool and unusual use of Excel!

http://www.dagoriginaldesigns.com/

# March 7, 2008 10:38 AM

Dithermaster said:

Here is another cool use of Excel.  It controls a spider robot, and does the complex calculations in order to make the legs move.

http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?t=1352

Very graceful movements, I think.

///d@

# March 7, 2008 11:21 AM

Ryan said:

I think i need to go back to school.  I had no idea.

Thanks

# March 7, 2008 2:35 PM

Krustov said:

While pursuing my MBA at Thunderbird I wrote a chess game in Excel as part of a VBA assignment.  It used a web service to calculate the moves, and a few nifty graphics I found online to display the pieces.

# March 9, 2008 7:46 AM

Erich Neuwirth said:

You might want to take a look at my animated population pyramid application

# March 10, 2008 5:03 PM

Erich Neuwirth said:

You might want to take a look at my animated population pyramid application

at

http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/Projects/demography/

# March 10, 2008 5:05 PM

Nick Burns said:

I've created a workbook that displays (12) Piano Key Chord charts, with the option of showing inversions.

# March 11, 2008 2:18 AM

Microsoft Help said:

Interesting and Usefull Stuff. I don't know about Excel much before reading this.

Thanks

# March 12, 2008 5:38 AM

Microsoft Operating System said:

It is really Cool Uses of Excels given Here. Buddy. Keep it up.

Thanks

http://www.iyogi.net/microsoftoperatingsystem.html

# March 12, 2008 5:41 AM

Lance said:

I used Excel while working on the project for my Master of Science in Physics; I wrote an add-in with a GUI that controlled several test and control instruments through the serial port, a GPIB card, and a data acquisition card installed in a PCI slot.  The raw data was dumped into a new worksheet and data processing and analysis code was used to automatically create charts, tables, and summaries.  The faculty on my thesis committee was amazed at the versatility that was demonstrated by the code I wrote completely in Excel VBA.

# March 18, 2008 2:14 AM

Derek Mang said:

I have built a tool (xla) I call VisualPlanner, for rapid, high-level resource estimation.

Simply put, tasks are represented by rectangular shapes on a worksheet, where each column represents a time period (week, month, day).

The task duration can be changed by stretching / squeezing the shape, and its start date can be changed by dragging-and-dropping the shape on a different column (left edge in the period / column of choice).

Click a toolbar button to refresh the plan, and it feeds back your resourcing needs for each period.

# March 28, 2008 1:49 PM

Microsoft Excel said:

Today's author, Jon Adams, a Tester on the Excel team. A copy of the spreadsheet discussed in this post

# April 14, 2008 9:37 PM
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