Today at work my team rolled our eyes at the latest uttering of “This is a living, breathing document.” I then joked that maybe we could give the spreadsheet some warts and some hair. That got me thinking - are there skins/mods for Excel that are cartoony and ridiculous? A cursory web search only turns up things that look “professional”.

Have y’all seen that nasty skin banana? Doesn’t this world have that, but in Excel? I’d like to see each cell have not-so-straight lines, some cells with little bumps/warts here and there, and little gross hairs in the corners. Bonus points if they pulsate. A pivot table could maybe have an appearance like it’s protruding out of the sheet, like a cartoon character who swallowed a safe and you can see the big square on their belly. Filtered rows could look like old skin wrinkles. “Excel illustrated by the one(s) responsible for Ren and Stimpy,” I guess.

And that’s just one gross hypothetical version. How about themes like Lisa Frank, or the menu from a Final Fantasy game. Think about the worlds in Super Mario Bros 3. Couldn’t we have spreadsheets that are themed like a desert, an ice world, or a jungle.

I’m running out of ideas but hopefully you get the picture.

DO THESE EXIST?

  • @TootSweetEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    I mean, I’m not advocating for foisting anything on OP’s coworkers without everyone being on board with it. OP’s talking about mods for the copy of Excel on his own machine (or rather more likely the machine his employer letsmakes OP use), not ways of fucking up a file (that would be shared between coworkers) right?

    Even if it’s a shared file, I can see whimsical tweaks (a haiku or a subtle Rick Roll that doesn’t interfere with my job or anything, maybe) that would be appropriate, but I’d agree I wouldn’t want coworkers skin-banana-ing spreadsheets I have to work with.

    • FuglyDuckEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      I mean, I’m not advocating for foisting anything on OP’s coworkers without everyone being on board with it. OP’s talking about mods for the copy of Excel on his own machine (or rather more likely the machine his employer letsmakes OP use), not ways of fucking up a file (that would be shared between coworkers) right?

      If you have columns and rows that aren’t straight, for example, that could lead OP creating/building/entering data in odd ways that their colleagues will then have to deal with. If some cells become unusable because of these “warts” randomly across the page… then anything the OP does to work around it will have to be worked around by anyone else not using their theme.

      It’s difficult to imagine anywhere that the spreadsheet won’t be shared with at least one other person.