/pixelator

C# Excel Add-in to embed picture pixels into the worksheet cells

Primary LanguageC#MIT LicenseMIT

Pixelator

A C# Excel Add-in to embed picture pixels into the worksheet cells

How it works

In the Ribbon, under the "Add-Ins" tab, there is a new button that says "Pixelate".

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When you click it, you will be asked to provide an image file. When you provide the file, the program will go through the image pixel-by-pixel and place each pixel's color into each respective cell.

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Why do you resize the photo?

If the image is too large, then it will be resized to fix the "Too many different cell formats" error.

Original Inspiration

When I first heard about the 73-year-old Japanese man using Excel to make art (link here), I first thought that he was painstakingly coloring each individual pixel a specific color. I had always thought "I could code that" by doing the reverse, which is to take a photo and pixelate it into the Excel cells.

That's what this Add-in does.

Later - when I actually read the article and looked at the images - I realized that the Japanese man was actually using a combination of things, but mostly Excel Shapes to get the art done. This is much different than I had originally thought. However, I still thought this little app was pretty cool, so I wrote it up for fun.

If you're going to fork / clone this

Be sure to create a signing key for the assembly before building / running locally.