
Tatsuo Horiuchi: The 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist (2013) - bootload
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-spreadsheet-artist/
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nsxwolf
If you like Tatsuo Horiuchi, it's worth checking out the late Hal Lasko, a
partially blind Microsoft Paint artist who recently died at the age of 98:

[http://www.hallasko.com/](http://www.hallasko.com/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVQHeowMdjI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVQHeowMdjI)

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jeffwass
Here's another MS Paint masterpiece by artist Stanley William Moore II.

[http://www.swmoore.com/2009/53](http://www.swmoore.com/2009/53)

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mstade
That's amazing. I wish it were horizontal though, and that I could buy prints
and put up in my hall way.

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guelo
I wouldn't really call this Excel per se. It's using Microsoft Office's
drawing tools which are also included in Word, PowerPoint, etc. You can add
shapes, color them, group them, etc. It doesn't really interact with Excel's
cells except if you do some fancy VBA scripting. It's still very impressive.

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pcurve
First I thought he was using each individual cell. Still amazing nonetheless.

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hjek
I was also expecting individual cells and VBA scripting. It's vector-graphics
he's making, and the title is absolutely misleading. Anyone can do
"spreadsheet art" by putting any image into MS Excel or Libreoffice Calc then!
I find the idea hinted at in the title way more interesting than these actual
images.

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frankjaeger
>Horiuchi also tried working with Microsoft Word but it didn’t offer the
flexibility that Excel did.

Can anyone see anything Excel-specific he actually used? Not being facetious,
I'm genuinely looking for it but can't seem to find it.

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viclou
Word (by default) puts shapes in a static/relative position line with text and
makes it hard to move shapes around without changing the text wrapping setting
for individual shapes.

Excel (by default) puts shapes in a absolute position that can be freely moved
around and repositioned.

PowerPoint does the same thing with shapes but there isn't a grid to draw on
top on.

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mintplant
Excel also gives you an infinite canvas to work with.

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scott_s
"Huh. Excel only goes to 16,384 columns." Said my office-mate many years ago
in grad school, when he was putting all of his data in one giant spreadsheet.

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protomyth
It also once had a row limit. I believe it was 32k, but its been a while. I
remember having to program my perl reporting tool to add a new sheet each
time.

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ashmud
It still has a row limit (and other limits), just bigger now (1048576).

Ref: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-
specification...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-
specifications-and-limits-1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3)

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ishtanbul
It looks like he's drawing on top of the spreadsheet, rather than using the
cells.

I've experimented with using a combination of conditional formatting and
"creative" formula writing to produce algorithmically generated
patterns/designs with some success...

Basically set cell height and width to 1 and you have a pixel grid. Use
formulas to drive values which drives conditional formatting.

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sachkris
> Basically set cell height and width to 1 and you have a pixel grid. Use
> formulas to drive values which drives conditional formatting.

I was expecting something like this when I read "Excel spreadsheet artist" in
the title.

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hobs
Yeah, you can see in [http://www.spoon-tamago.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/horiu...](http://www.spoon-tamago.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/horiuchi-tatsuo-ph1_px420.jpg) that its more like a
graph of overlayed shapes based on something, I dont know if they are hand
drawn or if they are derived in any other way, though based on the article it
would appear they might be individually created and posed in the scene.

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ekianjo
Note that it's not just something you can open in Excel it works in
LibreOffice 5 as well flawlessly.

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lirem
He has tutorials on how to draw in Excel here in Japanese:
[http://www2.odn.ne.jp/~cbl97790/kakikataHSK07.htm](http://www2.odn.ne.jp/~cbl97790/kakikataHSK07.htm)

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simple10
The xls files opened fine Numbers after a couple minutes of load time. They
rendered correctly but performance was too slow (constant spinning wheel of
doom) to see how he implemented it.

Anyone able to figure it out?

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gdilla
I was able to open in numbers - and as far as I can tell, he's using drawing
tools - shapes and fills - to do this. No traditional spreadsheet functions or
charts or anything.

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jqm
I made this a few months ago to play around w/ some stuff.

[http://photo2spreadsheet.com/](http://photo2spreadsheet.com/)

But no idea how the art in TA works.

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Paul_S
This story has been picked up several times by mainstream sites. How is it
that this is a news story but no mainstream pieces are ever written about
pixel artists for example.

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wiradikusuma
Has anyone tried playing around with the image? It's very slow. You must have
great patience to draw anything like that. That alone is something to applaud.

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thesmok
> Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most
> computers,” explained Horiuchi.

So that's the only reason he doesn't use Illustrator?

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ryan42
“Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most
computers." Both of these are false. There are plenty of freeware programs
that allow a user to draw vector or pixel shapes. Excel/Office has not come
preinstalled on any computers I've seen in many years.

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thesmok
But that's his experience. This man somehow got his computer with Excel
preinstalled and decided to use it for drawing instead of buying a proper
drawing application. As a result, he's now world-famous artist, not just yet
another illustrator on Deviantart.

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scrumper
These are good, very good, though I too was expecting "cell pixel" art. I
bought a print of Miroku Waterfall because I love the colors and my daughter
loves waterfalls.

"Cherry Blossoms" killed Excel 2016 on a brand new 16GB Mac laptop. I have to
assume it works fine on the Windows version otherwise I can't see even a calm
artist having the patience to complete a work.

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mhurron
Excel on OS X seems to have many problems with somewhat large xls(x) files. I
know a project manager that had to switch back to Windows because of that.

Office on OS X has always sucked. If it wasn't for Office's dominance on the
Windows side, the product would have died a long time ago.

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niels_olson
Do you think he knows about SVG?

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ZenPsycho
Interestingly, the drawing tools in MS Office traditionally use VML, which is
an XML format MS submitted for standardisation. The W3C decided to add their
own creative touches to VML and it became SVG.

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andersonmvd
The file when opened is extremely heavy. At least when opened on LibreOffice.
Because of this I can't even check the 'implementation details', but seems
very impressive of course.

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xufi
Interesting. I wouldn't have thought of doing this with Excel at all

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blubb-fish
So you _can_ do something useful with Excel ... now that's a surprise!

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mikecsh
Well.. this is a bit silly, given that half the world's businesses run on
Excel. It's an incredibly powerful and useful piece of software despite its
(numerous) shortcomings.

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kwhitefoot
People don't use Excel because it is powerful in an absolute sense, they use
it because it is the most powerful tool they can use without having to talk to
the IT department or pay a developer.

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mikecsh
Everything is relative and evidently a (good) programmer can wield even more
"power" another factor but that comes with its own shortcomings in terms of
cost, time, maintenance etc.

I stand by the point that Excel is an extremely powerful tool. It is very easy
as a developer to dismiss that but for the "normal" people in the world the
productivity gains it affords (with a much smaller learning curve cf.
programming) are huge.

