About the project, she says, “…the drawings are a part of a series that I executed on an irregular daily basis for 16 months. Each drawing is in a new ‘worksheet,’ which is automatically set up as a grid. The drawings were made by changing cell preferences for background color, fill pattern, and border styles and from time to time inserting ‘comment’ boxes and letters or words.”

Many of these have been published in a book by Various Projects and is for sale at Project No. 8. Some of the book’s pages are presented as an entrancing animation in this video.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I must warn you that Danielle Aubert’s website overloaded my brain and practically caused a seizure, but if you can successfully navigate the visual arrays without passing out then you will be rewarded with more pictures of her work.

I commend her for this creative use of a stodgy computational beast of a product. The only thing that might top her art would be if you could, oh, say, play video games in Excel…

[via DesignBoom]

Apparently, programming video games using insanely complex Excel Visual Basic macros is a bit of an art form in Japan. As a matter of fact, everything from Pac-Man to Space Invaders to Missile Command has been recreated with astounding detail using Excel macros.

Other spreadsheet games include versions of Donkey Kong, Dig Dug and Tetris. All in all, there are literally dozens of arcade classics that can be played in Excel. I’m especially impressed by the version of Arkanoid, complete with mouse and audio support (you don’t even know you’re in Excel when this one plays).

To play these games for yourself, just download the game you want from this website. Simply extract the .XLS from the archive (you may need something that can open LZH archives for some of these files), enable macros, and run the macro titled “start” or similar. Some of the games are a bit hit or miss due to problems with Japanese characters in the code, but I was able to get quite a few of them to play just fine on my machine. As a matter of fact, I was able to get a number of these games to run in the latest, greatest version of Excel 2007.

Once you’re up and running you can play all your favorites in between calculating standard deviations and building your loan amortization worksheet.