vba

2 Articles

Writing A Virtual Machine In Excel

December 25, 2014 by 26 Comments

[Ádám] participates in a competition called KöMaL. It’s a 9-times-a-month journal for junior high and high school students featuring math and physics problems. [Paul Erdős], one of the most published mathematicians of all time, was a huge participant and by far the most notable student to crack open a copy of KöMaL in its hundred-year history. [Ádám] was trying his hand at a problem in Excel, but the official rules prohibit the use of Excel macros. In a daze, he came up with one of the most clever uses of Excel: building an assembly interpreter with the most popular spreadsheet program.

This is a virtual Harvard architecture machine without writable RAM; the stack is only lots and lots of IFs.  The instructions – mostly load, MOV, JNZ, INC, and CMP solves this problem, examining two inputs to see if they multiples of each other. If you’re wondering, an example cell from [Ádám]’s Excel sheet looks like this:

=F6
   INDEX($C$2:$C99999,$G2,1),
   IF(AND(INDEX($B$2:$B99999,$G2,1)="JZ",$I2=0),
      INDEX($C$2:$C99999,$G2,1),
         IF(AND(INDEX($B$2:$B99999,$G2,1)="JNZ",$I2<>0),
         INDEX($C$2:$C99999,$G2,1),
         G2+1
         )
      )
   )
)

[Ádám] has provided his Excel solution to the problem, available on the hackaday.io. It’s in Hungarian which really shouldn’t matter since it’s basically Excel and a pseudo-x86 instruction set. but the column labels will require a bit of Google Translate.

excelMediaPlayer

Using Excel To Watch Movies At Work

October 24, 2014 by 38 Comments

The Excel subreddit exploded earlier this week when redditor [AyrA_ch] shared his custom spreadsheet that allowed him to play video files on a locked-down work computer. How locked down? With no access to Windows Media Player and IE7 as the only browser (all plugins disabled, no HTML5), Excel became the unlikely hero to cure a 3-hour boredom stint.

Behind the cascade of rectangles and in the land of the Excel macro, [AyrA_ch] took advantage of the program’s VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) functions to circumvent the computer’s restrictions. Although VBA typically serves the more-complex-than-usual macro, it can also invoke some Windows API commands, one of which calls Windows Media Player. The Excel file includes a working playlist and some rudimentary controls: play, pause, stop, etc. as well as an inspired pie chart countdown timer.

As clever as this hack is, the best feature is much more subtle: tricking in-house big brother. [AyrA_ch]’s computer ran an application to monitor process usage, but any videos played through the spreadsheet were attributed to Excel, ensuring the process usage stayed on target. You can download it for yourself over on GitHub.