Creating an Art with Microsoft Excel

Posted by max On December - 17 - 2008

The Google Docs team recently released a cool time-lapse video showing how their engineers painted snowflakes on a spreadsheet by filling individual cells with different colors.

For more examples of spreadsheet art, check out Art Of Office – it’s a Microsoft site for Mac Office users that hosts dozens of artwork created in Excel like this pixel painting of rural women.

Drawing a Google Logo in Microsoft Excel

Don’t worry – you don’t have to creative for doing paintings in Excel – it just requires patience and some time. For this example, we’ll paint a Google Logo in Microsoft Excel by tracing an existing JPG image. Here’s how the final artwork will look like inside Excel.

Step 1: Select the entire spreadsheet, right click and set the Row Height as 10 pixels. Now right clicks any of the column headers and set the column width as 2 pixels.

Step 2: Set the zoom level of the spreadsheet to around 60%.

Step 3: Go to Page Layout -> Background and set the background image as the Google Logo. We’ll use it as a tracing image.

Step 4: Now click any of the cells that lies above the “G” symbol and set the fill color (paint bucket icon) same as the color of “G”. Copy that cell and paste it all over G. You may change the fill color to lighter shades around the edges to slightly reduce the staircase like pixel effect.

Step 5: Follow the same with other symbols but remember to replace the fill colors accordingly. Once done, delete the background image.

Speed painting in Microsoft Excel

The above trick may not work with Google Docs since you cannot add background images in Google Spreadsheets.