Runs on your own hardware
CellVision
Video playing inside Excel, one cell per pixel.
Anyone curious how far a spreadsheet can be pushed.
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What it does
Plays video inside Microsoft Excel, using each cell as a pixel.
It’s a novelty. It’s also a fun way to find out how fast Excel’s COM interface can go.
- 01
Turns a worksheet into a frame buffer, one cell per pixel
- 02
Color fill and ASCII rendering modes
- 03
Streams frames over COM onto a pre-sized grid to keep writes fast
One frame
From a video file to a worksheet.
- 01
Square up the grid
Columns and rows are resized until every cell is square, so the picture isn’t stretched.
- 02
Read the video
OpenCV reads each frame from the video file and scales it down to the grid.
- 03
Paint the cells
Each pixel becomes a cell’s fill color, or a character in ASCII mode, written to Excel over COM. The grid is sized once, before the first frame, which keeps the writes fast.
Specification
What it’s built with, and when.
Pulled from the repository each time this site is built.
- State
- In development
- Discipline
- Research
- Shape
- Installed software
- Started
- Jul 2026
- Last change
- Jul 2026
- Commits
- 16
- Python
- OpenCV
- Excel COM
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