Forced to Use a Locked-down Work PC? Microsoft Excel is Here to Help You Pass the Time

Microsoft’s Office suite has been around for what seems like forever, and while many of its included products look tame on the outside, many of them are unbelievably complex under-the-hood. That being the case, there’s been some extremely cool tricks that some folks have created over the years, such as creating a small game that runs inside of Excel or a music video played with PowerPoint. It sure beats me using Excel to correct capitalization, that’s for sure.

While I fed my addiction called reddit last night, I stumbled on what has to be the coolest use of Excel I’ve ever seen. It’s not only cool as heck, but a potential boon to those who could make use of it. Check it out:

In case it’s not immediately clear, that’s a media player inside of a small spreadsheet file. While working on a professional Excel project, reddit user AyrA_ch finished-up much quicker than was expected, and so they were left in a bit of a lurch. They were being timed on how much Excel was being used, so simply closing the app meant a lesser paycheck. So, to pass the rest of the quota’d time, they decided to create an Excel spreadsheet that gets around some rather harsh OS limitations. Work PC use an ancient version of IE, locks-down Windows Media Player, and refuses any new apps to be installed? No problem!

In the first sheet of this Excel file is a list of files you want to be included in the player. To get these paths, you can go to the file in question, hold Shift and then right-click the file to “Copy path”. You then paste that path into one of cells in the ‘A’ column. Afterwards, you can go over to the second sheet, as seen in the shot above, and begin controlling the media.

There are a couple of seriously cool features here that might not be immediately noticeable. First, that pie chart in the middle automatically updates every second to show you the progress of the current media file being played. Second, you can use the seek buttons at the bottom to skip ahead or back 3 or 30 seconds. Finally, you can even play video this way, as long as the format is supported by Windows natively – that means most MP4s should work no problem. While you won’t have slider control for the timeline in a film, you can use the seek buttons to traverse the file just fine.

In AyrA_ch’s case, this use of Excel proved to be very useful, because all of this media plays through the app. That means that the timer that was going on in the background would be actively monitoring Excel even though media was playing. It’s brilliant.

This really gives some truth to the old adage, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Want the file? Head here.