Technabob » spreadsheet

HardlyWork.in: Make Your Facebook Feed Look Like an Excel Spreadsheet

Range — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 13:39:40 +0000

Do you work in an office that still allows you to access Facebook? If you do, then check out this awesome stealth way of looking up on your news feed. It makes your feed look like an Excel spreadsheet. Now that’s stealthy, thanks to HardlyWork.in!

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]

Can’T You See I’M Busy? How to Slack Off and Play Games at Your Job

Technabob — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:55:20 +0000

Sick of your job, but can’t afford to quit? Why not sit in your cubicle and play video games all day? But your boss is always looking over your shoulder, you say? Now that’s no problem thanks to these clever games disguised as office applications.

Just stop by over at CantYouSeeImBusy.com, choose your program, and get to work! Right now, you’ve got three great timewasters to choose from – Breakdown, which conceals a game of Breakout in a word processor (I love how the horizontal scroll bar is your paddle, and the words are the bricks); Cost Cutter, which plays sorta like a sideways Tetris, but with bar charts; and finally Leadership, an updated version of Lunar Lander, built on a set of line graphs.

The guys over at CantYouSeeImBusy are themselves actually hard at work making up new games for you to play while your boss walks by. Of course, if he’s not watching, you could always be more conspicuous and just play some of these classic games recreated in Excel.

[via oink! via Punto Geek]

Classic Arcade Games Excel in Spreadsheets

Technabob — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 11:30:53 +0000

Sure, you could use your copy of Microsoft Excel to create the business model for your next big multi-million dollar venture, or to calculate last month’s sales for your used car dealership, but why not put it to some really good use and play some arcade games with it instead?

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.