Spreadsheet Excel Lesson

By Author: Excel Everest
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Excel was designed, well, to be rather boring - numbers, charts, pivots, lookups - more utility than fireworks. But the world is a creative place, and creative people put the tools at their disposal to use in unimaginable ways.

These are the 7 wackiest things we could find that have been done in Microsoft Excel. When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankstone made VisiCalc in the late 1970s, think they would have imagined this set of craziness? If you find anymore that you think might make the absurdity cut, email blog@exceleverest.com and we'll put them in!

We'll start with this famous gem.
Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne created what they call the world's first music video in Excel. And if you are wondering why they went ahead and did this in the first place - well, your corporate firewall may well block videos and MP3's, but who ever heard of a firewall that excluded Excel files?

ExcelGames.org is dedicated to games that have been written exclusively in Excel. With some VBA hacking skills, they're not actually not all that hard to design, and you can (after a little practice) go ahead and try designing some simple ones yourself. From mazes to golf, this is hands down the largest repository of Excel games on the internet. Word on the street is that Blizzard is working on a cut of StarCraft 2 in microsoft excel lesson plans. OK, maybe not.

If you haven't seen this before, it'll blow your mind. Peter Rakos, Excel God, created a 3D graphics engine entirely in Excel. He uses two approaches, one using the cells themselves as pixels and the other using Office-level graphics (like charts, etc) as an abstraction layer. The article rocks and lays out exactly how Peter pulled this off. It's a must read for anyone interested in craziness in Excel and you'll learn a bit about 3D graphics engines while you're at it.

Art is probably the last thing you'd associate with microsoft excel 2007 tutorial, but that's not the case for Danielle Aubert. An artist with perseverance in her cells, Danielle has created a book on art using Excel And as the picture below shows (taken from her website), she's good. Investment banking would be a lot more exciting if there were more Danielles in the world.

Would Beethoven, if alive today, have written Fur Elise in Excel? We'll answer that right now. NO. But he could have! Kevin McDowell created a fully functional music synthesizer built into an Excel file - points for originality, points for imagination, and extra points for awesomeness! Feel like giving it a try yourself? Download here, and give your musical inner geek a rare treat. We're thinking corporate earnings calls should be require companies to run their financials through this puppy.

You've probably wanted to turn in your corporate report with a picture of your face as the table of contents for a long time. Well, now you can. Welcome Boydevlin software's ExcelArt, a free application that converts images into Excel Mosaics, treating the individuals cells as pixels. There's lots of opportunities for this...we're thinking someone should script some macros to perform image modification and distortion.

This one kind of doesn't count, as it's not an *actual* Excel file, but it's too good to leave out. Elliott Kember has created Spreadtweet, a Twitter client that looks EXACTLY like a Microsoft Excel file. Goodbye productivity.

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ExcelEverest.com sells an interactive Corporate excel training that's built right into an Excel file. It covers 41 topics and has 155 exercises, 339 buttons, and 87 embedded videos. For more related articles please visit http://www.exceleverest.com/blog/.