I dedicate this section to modeling games in MS Excel. These are not the hidden Excel games such as the Easter Egg for instance. Download the free games available and use them in any version of Excel. Due to the excessive amount of new features, the new Excel versions would be slower though. Lean how to develop animations in MS Excel which you can use as games. You can certainly impress your colleagues. These are animations and games that YOU created! You can impress your bosses too. As a consequence you might snag yourself a bonus or even a promotion. Though seemingly hard, you might find developing certain games in a spreadsheet can be quite easy and satisfying. There nonetheless several different ways of creating such games. The first thing people are concerned when seeing excel games is animation. How can you possibly do that, they ask? Without trying to be exhaustive, there are essentially three methods to create animation in a spreadsheet.
The simplest method would be to selectively fill groups of spreadsheet cells with different colors and use VBA code (Visual Basic for Applications) to change these colors in time. This style of animation is better used in creating excel puzzles.
You can create various shapes in PowerPoint or directly in Excel, using the “draw” menu. After properly renaming these shapes you can again use VBA game code to move them around, or re-scale them, or change the color in real time.
You can also use a scatter chart to display x-y data as simple “wire-frame” objects. Of course you will need to develop basic algorithms or code to manipulate and change the data in time.
You can also use a scatter chart to display x-y vertices only and instead of markers you will paste an image on each vertex. This method is very similar to the previous one. The images manipulated on the chart are called “sprites”. Imagine a puppet show, where you can handle many different dolls but only a few are “active”, which means the spectators see them displayed above the curtain.
This is a continuation tutorial, the second in the wire-frame tutorial series. Here we take the 2D basic house we created on an 2D scatter chart and introduce rotation. These basic tutorials use elementary math/geometry and trigonometry (middle school and high school level). As the series progresses, the tutorials will reach 3D level and the creation of more complex shapes… Read More... "Excel Animation Tutorial – 2D Wire-frame House #2 (adding rotation)"
In this tutorial, a very simple 2D house will be built from scratch. Three parameters, will then be set up to control the scale, x offset and y offset. A demo macro is then created to animate the house with the three parameters changing in time. The purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate at a very basic level how… Read More... "Excel Animation Tutorial – 2D Wire-frame House #1 (build, scaling, x&y translations)"
A collection of animated models in Excel. They were created using cell formulas and VBA. No add-ons or any kind of plugins were used. Read More... "Excel Magic Animation"
>. In this brief video, I am introducing an old yoga animation, together with a fresh driving car model which is a work in progress. You will soon be able to download both of them from excelunusual.com. Enjoy! 0:00 hello my friends and welcome back 0:03 i just found today is gonna be a very 0:05 short video i found… Read More... "Cars and Yoga – Excel Animation Discussion"
>. This tutorial brings up an older topic from my blog, excelunusual.com. It is the second part of a short series, showing in detail, how to create a virtual joystick in MS Excel/VBA to serve as a game controller. The Excel file will be available for download on my blog, excelunusual.com. Enjoy! 0:00 Hello my friends and welcome back 0:02… Read More... "Excel Animation – the Virtual Joystick Tutorial #2"
>. This tutorial brings up an older topic from my blog, excelunusual.com. It is the first part of a short series, showing in detail, how to create a virtual joystick in MS Excel/VBA to serve as a game controller. The Excel file will be available for download on my blog, excelunusual.com. Enjoy! Hello my friends and welcome back today 0:02… Read More... "Excel Animation – the Virtual Joystick Tutorial #1"
An Excel animated model using Free shapes created by a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) routine. A conditional “Do” loop runs the show. Every loop cycle the stars and connecting lines are deleted and new ones are formed in different positions. The sizes, positions and colors are controlled by harmonic functions (sin/cos(x)). Visit excelunusual.com for more Excel animations. Enjoy! Thanks… Read More... "Dance of the Constellations – Excel Animation"
>. This tutorial brings briefly introduces an older airplane/Ninja cat animation, then it shows how to flip a logic (Boolean) variable using the operator “Not”. Most of the tutorial however, is centered toward the Active X control button in Excel animation and the associated macro. It shows how to create and customize this button, then it shows how to introduce… Read More... "The ActiveX Spin Button tutorial – VBA tricks for Excel Animation"
By popular demand I am coming back to Excel after a long hiatus. This is the third in the series of beginner level tutorials targeted to building Excel animated models and games. >. This is the third part of the video tutorials about one of the most important Excel animation macros (or sub routines). It’s the “toggle” macro built pretty… Read More... "The Start-Pause VBA Macro for Excel Animation, tutorial – part 3"
By popular demand I am coming back to Excel after a long hiatus. This is the second in the series of beginner level tutorials targeted to building Excel animated models and games. >. This is the second part of the video tutorials about one of the most important Excel animation macros (or sub routines). I am reviewing there (with PowerPoint… Read More... "The Start-Pause VBA Macro for Excel Animation, tutorial – part 2"
By popular demand I am coming back to Excel after a long hiatus. This is the first in the series of beginner level tutorials targeted to building Excel animated models and games. >. Past a few minutes of introduction into a 4-stroke engine Excel animation model, the video dives into how to build the first and perhaps the most important… Read More... "The Start-Pause VBA Macro for Excel Animation, tutorial – part 1"
By popular demand I am coming back to Excel after a long hiatus. This is an update of an older model previously presented on this blog. > I added a few features to the roller coaster model as follows: 1) Performance log 2) All sorts of colors and color scheme selection 3) Speed control 4) Coaster length adjustment 3) Ground… Read More... "Excel Roller Coaster Update #1"
About Excel animation and Excel games – an introduction: Hello everyone, in this section we will be talking about sprites and and how to use the sprites in MS Excel to create animation. This is going to be a general discussion, a demonstrative, introductory talk. It shows you what we can do with sprites in Excel. In general language,… Read More... "Sprite Animation – what are sprites and how to use them in Excel animation and Excel games"
This is a preview of a minigun Excel animation, that I developed in MS Office. This animated model could be used in future Excel games. I created the graphics in PowerPoint while the animation is being run 100% by VBA code. Join our group to find out more: https://www.facebook.com/groups/excelunusual/ Enjoy, George Read More... "A minigun animation in MS Excel for Excel games"