How many times have you been there? Hours of compiling and scrubbing data. Then days at the keyboard to get the Excel formulas and marcos just right so reports run correctly. Followed by the arduous back and forth of End User Testing only to hear “Can you make it look better? It just looks too much like Excel.”

Art in Excel

In Japan, Tatsuo Horiuchi, uses Excel to create landscapes paintings. He does not use pens, pencils, or canvas, but columns, rows, and cells in Microsoft Excel.

Mr. Horiuchi was approaching retirement and was in search of a hobby that did not need expensive supplies or software, so he used one of the most popular programs of all time. Within six years he won the Autoshape Art Contest in 2006.

His art is a mixture of the delicate and harmonious landscapes that are often are in the traditional style of Japanese paintings.

If you are dying to see the raw files in Excel, you can check out the raw Excel files here.

So, the next time your graph or pie chart gets the thumbs down, turn to Horiuchi-san for inspiration!