HardlyWork.in reformats your Facebook feed into something inconspicuous, which is a must if you spend time working in an office. I remember those days. While you certainly don’t need to waste all of your time, you can check up on what’s happening without getting hassled by nosy coworkers and annoying bosses.

One thing’s for sure, it will allow you to look productive and professional even when you’re checking up on what your friends are doing. It’s even a good idea for bosses. You wouldn’t want your underlings seeing what you’ve been up to over the weekend.

[HardlyWork.in via Lifehacker]

Ben Geebelen used Excel to create the pattern on his TulipK lamp, then used software called 3-matic and output it to a 3D printer to generate the tulip petals. Each of the six petals is connected to a mechanism which allows the shade to be opened and closed around the bulb, providing a sort of analog dimming mechanism.

The Excel spreadsheet provided the locations for each of the 2374 precisely placed holes in each of the petals, then created a 3D STL file for generating the actual printed petals which were output using selective laser sintering.

It’s the best use of a spreadsheet since Excel Pac-Man and Missile Command.

[via i.materialize]

The game is pretty much what you’d expect. It’s an optional download that works in Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Once it’s installed it sits on your ribbon – where else? – and, just like when you’re playing games on the Xbox 360 or PS3, certain actions you take while using any of the aforementioned programs will automatically earn you points. But you can also click the Ribbon Hero button to engage in challenges, i.e. learning activities, complete with hints. You can integrate the add-on with your Facebook account to compete or compare scores with your friends.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

You can download Ribbon Hero for free at the Microsoft Office Labs website. Currently, it’s only available for Windows users (XP and above) with Office 2007 and above. Microsoft should release a similar program to teach users about keeping their computers malware-free.

[via Wonderland]

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.