All articles with 'excel games' Tag

We love spreadsheets. And of course, once every four years, we also get mad about soccer. So why not merge both of them in to one awesome, frivolous and fun thing: Introducing….

The best part is you don’t have to run up to play this. Set your aim and let RANDBETWEEN() decide your fate.

My twins (Nishanth & Nakshtra) are now almost 7. They are super keen to learn how computers work. So the other day, I showed them Code.org where there are several coding exercises disguised as games. They loved those games … err coding exercises. So that got me thinking… why not make a game in Excel that teaches kids simple programming concepts.

So I built a Snowman & Hot Chocolate Maze game. In this post, let’s understand how to build such a game using Excel VBA.

Sometimes you think you know something and then suddenly you are surprised. Yesterday was such a moment for me. I have been using Excel for almost a decade now. So naturally I assumed that I know it well. But then yesterday, while doing something I stumbled on a strange screen in Excel that looked like very popular Angry birds game. So I got searching. But there was no mention of it anywhere on net. Then I asked my friend Rollf ‘O’ Pai, who is in Micros0ft Execl team. First he denied such a thing. But we knew each other so well that he could never lie to me. So he confided. He told me what I had suspected for several years.

There is an Angry birds like video game buried in Excel!!! It was meant to be an Easter egg in Excel 2010 (and 2013), but due to backlash from senior management no one ever published the details about it.

So I asked him “How do I unlock it?”. Rollf ‘O’ Pai asked me to never reveal it to anyone and then told me the recipe.

Once I unlocked I could not believe how cool it is!

Read on to understand how to unlock this game.

Watching the Olympic athletes run & jump all I could think of is,

• What should I eat to jump & sprint like that?
• How come I never heard about steeple chase?
• Should we really have 3 bullet points in all lists?

But I digress. Coming back, when watching one of those hurdles events, I got an idea as sharp as Chinese table tennis team.

Why not create a hurdles game in Excel to measure how good you are with keyboard?

So ladies & gentleman, let me present you our very own Olympics hurdle run.

Almost an year ago, we had a memorable dashboard contest on Sales Dashboards. We got 32 beautiful, outstanding, well crafted entries and it was a lot of fun learning new tricks & meeting new members of our community. I am planning to have one more dashboard contest and I need your help.

I need you to suggest a topic for the contest (optional: and give some sample data)

Just drop a comment with your suggestions (and point to source data if any). We will have a dashboard contest on one of those topics.

Read the rest of this post to get some useful Excel related links.

Remember the Sales Visualization Challenge? We got 32 extremely good dashboards submitted and finally you voted Alex Kerin’s entry as the winner. So when I informed Alex that he is the winner, I also asked him to send me a pic of him with the iPod Touch that he won. Yesterday, he sent it to […]

Welcome to another edition of excel links. During the last week, I have revised excel downloads page on PHD and now it contains over 75 excel templates, tutorial downloads. I am not sure if you dig the new format of the page though. So go take a look at it and let me know what […]

Sanjay, my colleague is an avid programmer and excel enthusiast. In his spare time he wrote a small VBA macro to solve Sudoku. Sudoku is a very famous number based puzzle with a 9×9 grid of cells. Each of the 9 rows, columns and 3×3 blocks should be filled in such a way that they have all the numbers from 1 to 9. Sudoku is a very effective way to keep your brain cells ticking. I am a huge sudoku fan and I solve sudoku whenever I have few minutes to kill. So naturally I jumped with joy when I saw Sanjay’s excel macro for solving sudoku. He is kind enough to let me share this with all of you.