MS Excel has long been an important tool for data analysis and calculation. However, some users are also developing the artistic side of the tool. Today, let's look into some amazing programs that can convert image into excel spreadsheet color blocks or excel spreadsheet mosaic if you will, of course, you can do that by hand, if time and patience are not problems. Of course, there are more programs or codes available in the internet, I will add them in if I see them.
1. Think Maths is a group of mathematics speakers who visit schools and run workshops and sessions for all ages and abilities. They developed an online tool to turn a digital photo into an Excel spreadsheet. The website is here: http://think-maths.co.uk/spreadsheet
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| Trout in Pixels via Think Math |
Digital photographs are actually just spreadsheets. When you take a photo, your camera measures the amount of red, green and blue light hitting each pixel, ranks them on a scale from 0 to 255 and then records those values as a spreadsheet.
Matt Parker found a way to actually open digital photos as spreadsheets in Excel. The process involves cracking the digital photo file open, scraping out all of the numbers and putting them into the cells of an Excel spreadsheet. Conditional formatting is then used to colour each cell so that it is completely black for "0", fully bright for "255" and every whole-number shade inbetween. This is applied so that the rows of the spreadsheet alternate between red, green and blue exactly as they would in a digital photo.
I tested this tool, it is very handy and fun. For a big image, you will have to zoom out enough to see the overall presence. The basic mechanism of this program, I figure, is to turn the pixels into numbers, and then apply the conditional formatting.
2. Niels Horn developed a version of BMP to xls spreadsheet software. The description of the usage o this software:
- only uncompressed bmp files (but compressed bmp files are very rare)
- only 24-bit color files
- maximum width 255 pixels (Excel limitation of number of columns)
- maximum height 1000 pixels (just to make it managable)
You can find more info here in this link, http://www.nielshorn.net/prog/vba/vbaXL_bmp2xls.php
3. Andypope.info also has a BMP to xls program available.
The address is, http://www.andypope.info/fun/bmpconvert.htm
In there, you will find two vba sheets can converting BMP to XY Scatter Plot and Spreadsheet color blocks.
The program reads the BMP file and then analyses the colour content.
As long as the image contains 56 or less unique the colours it will be plotted.
Depending on the image size you may need to increase the markers in order to fill in white space. Or reduce the size to stop overlapping.
Also adjusting the plot area size can reduce banding when the markers are too far apart.
The .zip file also contains a few bmp images to use for testing.
4. BMP to XLS
It is a program developed by Mattia Campolese.
BMP to XLS is a very unuseful file that converts bitmap images (*.bmp) to Microsoft Excel (97/2000/XP/2003) files (*.xls); just select the bitmap image and click on “Convert” button; the software will open an istance of Microsoft Excel that will be closed after the process. Open the file and enjoy it :-). There is a demo image and xls file in the *.exe path. It will automatically convert every bitmap to a 8-bit bitmap so don’t worry for result quality.
Link: http://www.matsoftware.it/software/bmp-to-xls
5. CONVERT YOUR IMAGE PIXEL’S INTO A EXCEL CELL’S
This code is written by CHAKRILOG. The blog provides the code in Java and VBA. Check it out if you are interested.
https://chakrilog.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/convert-your-image-pixels-into-a-excel-cells/
6. Excel Pixel Art Generator 2.0
This code was developed by William Harding, although I didn't test it, seems he did a good job.
The link: http://williamjeffreyharding.com/dataprocess/PixelArtGenerator.html
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