Creating Excel Art from Images [spreadsheet fun]
Amit at Digital Inspiration features a lengthy way of creating beautiful excel cell art from an image. I guess we all can use a method that is little simpler and smarter.
The objective: to convert an image to cell art by adjusting background color
The Means: obviously VBA
The Solution: Of course someone already solved it, and it is none other than Andy Pope. Download the tool for converting BMP files to XY Scatter charts or cell art from his site. Once you have the file,
- Take any image you want to convert and open it in an image editor like Paint.NET or photoshop
- Reduce the number of colors in the image to 56
- Save the image as BMP
- Now go back to the downloaded file and open the VB Editor (Alt+F11)
- Open the form frmBMPLoader and hit F5 to run the form
- Specify the BMP file path to convert the image to cell art
- Once the processing is done, adjust zoom (to 10%) to see the entire image
What next? Now that you know a cool way to have some fun with excel, why not get serious and read some of the past posts on PHD
?
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At Pointy Haired Dilbert, I have one goal, "to make you awesome in excel and charting". PHD is started in 2007 and today has 300+ articles and tutorials on using excel, making better charts. 




Hi,
I was reading ur blog posts and found some of them to be very good.. u write well.. Why don’t you popularize it more.. ur posts on ur blog ‘pointly haired dilbert’ took my particular attention as some of them are interesting topics of mine too;
BTW I help out some ex-IIMA guys who with another batch mate run http://www.rambhai.com where you can post links to your most loved blog-posts. Rambhai was the chaiwala at IIMA and it is a site where users can themselves share links to blog posts etc and other can find and vote on them. The best make it to the homepage!
This way you can reach out to rambhai readers some of whom could become your ardent fans.. who knows..
Cheers,
Ivan F. Moala did some similar in x-cel files.com some time ago.
You can look at his ImageToExcel converter in http://www.xcelfiles.com/ImageToXL.html#anchor_93
Regards.