People can do amazing things with Excel. Enter Anish Shah, a self-proclaimed magician who wanted to take a short vacation recently (who doesn't?). The trouble was, his primary criteria was a warm place, and while there are plenty of sites out there that will tell you all you need to know about a place, there aren't too many that disgorge information about temperatures all that easily. Of course, Google will get you what you need, but it needs a little bit of inspired searching. And when your shortlist of locations spreads across continents, you can be sure you need a couple of hours at the least of tedious searching. That's where Anish comes in - This Excel wiz used a feature in Excel called web queries to create a database of weather information from over two thousand places across the world. Yes, you read that right: 2000 places.

In his own words:

"That is why I created a very simple tool called Destination Decider. Download the small excel file here. Raw weather data1 gathered from the U.S Department of Energy from over two thousand locations2 across the globe was aggregated in Excel with the help of web queries. (I highly recommend learning how to use web queries as it can be a highly efficient way of downloading large amounts of data into Excel with little effort). Once the data was downloaded, I created a simple pivot table that summarizes the weather data where an even simpler form pulls from the pivot table. The form asks you to input the following: Month in which you plan on travelling Low-end of a desirable temperature range High-end of a desirable temperature range"

... and that's it really - you're good to go, with a list that tells you places that fit your requirements. Talk about an innovative (and useful!) way to use the many and myriad powers of Excel. Here's the website, which also has a link from where you can download the Excel file that will perform said miracle.

Strange Uses of Excel

There's many things that Microsoft Excel can do, and now, predicting breast cancer prognosis is on the list. 

A recent article in the "Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer" points to a a study undertaken using a relatively simple algorithm built in Microsoft Excel, that allows doctors to predict if patients will benefit from a particular form of treatment, when diagnosed with breast cancer.

"Findings from the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project" is the rather imposing name of the study, but it has an important finding - nearly 80% of breast cancer patients are likely to not benefit from chemotherapy after surgery, but will suffer the side effects nonetheless. 

The real breakthrough, however, lies in the fact that the diagnostic tool in this case is good old Microsoft Excel, rather than some complicated, really expensive software that is out of reach (and understanding) of most. This blog is primarily about Microsoft Excel and not medicine, so let's spare ourselves the details about exactly what was done - suffice it for us to know that powerful prognosis predictions was made using good old Excel, and hey - it works!

The algorithm simply divided the number of patients into a training and validation population, and was able to arrive at an equation that predicted the likelihood of chemotherapy succeeding after surgery. And with 144 and 151 patients in the two different populations, doctors are fairly certain about the statistical validity of these results.

Are other diseases next? 

Link: Microsoft Excel based algorithm predicts breast cancer prognosis

Strange Uses of Excel

Microsoft is going all out to advertise how great Excel 2010 really is, and you are likely to come across some pretty good ideas if you keep an eye out on stuff that they are writing.

And one such interesting nugget is a delightful llitle post on how to go about creating games in MS Excel 2010.

The post is by Karen Cheng, a program manager on the Excel team. She explains in great detail the steps required for building a typical game, and certain commands that are required for the game that we are going to be talking about in the current post.

As she mentions in the post itself: "In this game, creeps move toward your castle. You must defend it by placing towers which shoot at the creeps. The more creeps you kill, the more money you get to buy and upgrade your towers."

Simple enough, right? In fact, you can download the game itself from this link. The only thing is, you need to have Office 2010 installed on your computer. Use it to explore what Excel 2010 can do.

Strange Uses of Excel

We've got an Excel message in a bottle for you and we're sending out an S.O.S. to the world. The bottle, in this case, is a password protected Excel file that contains a list of people who've figured out how to open it. Can you join them?

What's given up above is a simple puzzle, which should take almost all of you next to no time at all. Hell, given that the readers of this blog are Excel users, this should be a piece of cake. Right!? Once you're able to solve this little problem, use the answer to open this file:

The Message in a Bottle.xls (37.00 kb)

And once you do so, add your name to the list of people who have cracked the code before you, lock it back up, and send the bottle + image on it's merry way to your friends. 

It's one of the more "out there" uses of Excel, we'll admit, but hey - it's a whole lot of fun. And whatever you do, do NOT leave the answer in the comments below - but do let us know if you crack it.

All the best!

Strange Uses of Excel

Update: Thanks to a comment we've made this the 8 wackiest (coolest) things ever done in Excel. Email blog@exceleverest.com with suggestions on others. Let's make this a running list.

Excel was designed, well, to be rather boring - numbers, charts, pivots, vlookups - more utility than fireworks. But the world is a creative place, and creative people put the tools at their disposal to use in unimaginable ways.

These are the 7 wackiest things we could find that have been done in Microsoft Excel. When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankstone made VisiCalc in the late 1970s, think they would have imagined this set of craziness? If you find anymore that you think might make the absurdity cut, email blog@exceleverest.com and we'll put them in!

1. AC/DC Music Video

We'll start with this famous gem. Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne created what they call the world’s first music video in Excel. And if you are wondering why they went ahead and did this in the first place – well, your corporate firewall may well block videos and MP3’s, but who ever heard of a firewall that excluded Excel files?

2. Games, Games, Games, Games (http://www.excelgames.org)

ExcelGames.org is dedicated to games that have been written exclusively in Excel. With some VBA hacking skills, they're not actually not all that hard to design, and you can (after a little practice) go ahead and try designing some simple ones yourself. From mazes to golf, this is hands down the largest repository of Excel games on the internet. Word on the street is that Blizzard is working on a cut of StarCraft 2 in Excel. OK, maybe not. 

3. 3D Graphics Engine 

If you haven't seen this before, it'll blow your mind. Peter Rakos, Excel God, created a 3D graphics engine entirely in Excel. He uses two approaches, one using the cells themselves as pixels and the other using Office-level graphics (like charts, etc) as an abstraction layer. The article rocks and lays out exactly how Peter pulled this off. It's a must read for anyone interested in craziness in Excel and you'll learn a bit about 3D graphics engines while you're at it. 

4. 16 Months Worth of Drawings in Microsoft Excel

Art is probably the last thing you’d associate with Microsoft Excel, but that’s not the case for Danielle Aubert. An artist with perseverance in her cells, Danielle has created a book on art using Excel  And as the picture below shows (taken from her website), she’s good. Investment banking would be a lot more exciting if there were more Danielles in the world. 

5. Music Synthesizer

Would Beethoven, if alive today, have written Fur Elise in Excel? We'll answer that right now. NO. But he could have! Kevin McDowell created a fully functional music synthesizer built into an Excel file - points for originality, points for imagination, and extra points for awesomeness! Feel like giving it a try yourself? Download here, and give your musical inner geek a rare treat. We're thinking corporate earnings calls should be require companies to run their financials through this puppy. 

6. Excel Mosaic Creator  

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You've probably wanted to turn in your corporate report with a picture of your face as the table of contents for a long time. Well, now you can. Welcome Boydevlin software's ExcelArt, a free application that converts images into Excel Mosaics, treating the individuals cells as pixels. There's lots of opportunities for this...we're thinking someone should script some macros to perform image modification and distortion.

7. Spreadtweet, the "Excel" Twitter Engine

This one kind of doesn't count, as it's not an *actual* Excel file, but it's too good to leave out. Elliott Kember has created Spreadtweet, a Twitter client that looks EXACTLY like a Microsoft Excel file. Goodbye productivity.

8. 3D Roller Coaster Simulation Built on a Scatterplot

This, a 3D roller coaster simulation in Excel built with a scatter plot and minimal code, blew our mind. George Lundin, showcases this and a number of other Excel feats ranging from planetary motion models to mechanical oscillation his YouTube Channel EngineeringIsFun. We're trying to get George to run a guest post on how he built some of these so stay tuned.

Strange Uses of Excel