J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

AC/DC Video In Excel

Here's a first: AC/DC Music Video Distributed as Excel Spreadsheet.

Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne, who work at a digital design boutique division of Sony/BMG in London, have put together what they call "the world's first music video in Excel format," for AC/DC.

They decided on this unusual format because they wanted the video to penetrate even the most Draconian corporate firewalls. After all, who can't receive an Excel spreadsheet?

Download the XLS file here. Does not work in Excel for Mac.

The VBA project is not protected, so you can take a look at the macros. The workbook has an embedded WAV file, but the "video" is not real video. Disable the Worksheet_SelectionChange procedure in the Sheet1 module and select the B2:J20 merged range while it's playing. Unhide column Q and change the background color to see where the "frames" are coming from.

(Thanks Patrick Crosley)

- Reader Comments -

Following are comments in response to this item.
The most recent comment is at the bottom.

1. By Blayne. Comment posted 25 October, 2008 9:06pm

   Why wouldn't it play the entire new song?
   
   How would you insert a new song from say a different album or artist?
   
   I found the code (down to row 639), but how does it work?
   
   Can it be 'colorized'?
   
   Cool stuff anyway.
   
   Whoops, just got this message ...
   
2. By John Nevill. Comment posted 26 October, 2008 12:43pm

   Very impressive.
   
   Blayne, the code is fairly simple. It's just starting the wav file then looping through the cells that you found (column 17 starting at row 100 to 639) and assigning that value to the cell that is displaying the video.
   
   Does anyone know what software they used to perform the video to text conversion?
3. By Ross. Comment posted 27 October, 2008 6:34am

   John,
   There are a few free wear apps that do it, have a look on the code project site, I have seen a few on there "image to text" should get you started
4. By Mumtaz. Comment posted 15 November, 2008 6:36am

   Reminds me of that paper-airplane flight simulator in excel that created quite an excitement sometime ago. But that was a binary object embedded in a spreadsheet. Right?
5. By John Walkenbach. Comment posted 15 November, 2008 7:00am

   The paper airplane simulator was probably a workbook with a Flash game embedded. I've seen several of those, and I don't understand the point.
   
   Along the same lines, people often send me a screen shot to illustrate a problem. A significant number of them put the image in a Word document, rather than just sending the image itself.