- Excel games are fairly niche. Most of the time, they come from people learning VBA as part of a course or to expand their Excel skillset. Almost all games use a combination of VBA and handcrafted macros to deliver the fun, but Excel can also play host to many flash games. Be warned: the flash games are much harder to hide from other people!
- This is an online quiz called Games Microsoft Excel There is a printable worksheet available for download here so you can take the quiz with pen and paper. Search Help in Finding Games Microsoft Excel - Online Quiz Version.
April 02, 2018 - by Tatiana Ufimtceva
R/ExcelGames: This subreddit is dedicated to discussions about games and simulations made in MS Excel environment. Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. Game in Excel: CellSweeper. It works a little bit like Minesweeper, which you probably know from your old Windows computer. Instead of just clicking around, you walk trough the mine field and try not to step on a bomb or meet a zombi (instruction are available). You can download CellSweeper here.
There are many different ways to learn Excel, and each of them have its own advantages as different people have different learning styles. For those who like to learn with fun and real experience involved there is a gamified tool to learn Excel – Hot Key Excellence (www.hotkeyexcel.com).
Learning Pyramid
The global market for gamification in business overall is booming in our digital era. Why? Because it works! Look at the Learning Pyramid, researched and created by the National Training Laboratories in Betel, Maine.
The pyramid illustrates the percentage of learner recall that is associated with various approaches. The first four levels (lecture, reading, audio and visual and demonstration) are passive learning methods. The bottom two levels (discussion in groups and practice by doing) are active learning methods.
The Learning Pyramid clearly illustrates that active participation in the learning process results in a higher retention of learning.
When you learn Excel via Game by playing– you learn by doing, it’s fun and engaging and increases the learning speed up to 5 times.
Time is Money – “sharpen your saw” in Excel
Knowing and using Excel shortcuts, formulas and tricks can save you tons of time! Your priority should be to learn how to be mouse-free in Excel. You increase your speed up to 10 times when you get rid of the mouse. Getting comfortable using Excel without a mouse will take about 3–4 weeks.
With the mouse-free interactive game Hot Key Excellence (www.hotkeyexcel.com) you’ll build your Excel muscle memory 5 times faster as you can learn and try at the same time.
How Hot Key Excellence saves time
And now Hot Key Excellence is free to download and you can get additional topics you are interested in right from the trial version – download free version here.
It is mouse-free Monday. You will be faster in Excel if you learn some keyboard shortcuts. I am suggesting that you try to give up your mouse in Excel for one hour each Monday.
Excel Thought Of the Day
I've asked my Excel Master friends for their advice about Excel. Today's thought to ponder:
Well-skilled people and professional experts solve complicated problems with simple tools and means.
Being a social, outdoors sort of person, I took it upon myself a couple of years ago to attempt a port of a ZX Spectrum game that would run within Microsoft Excel.
I’d seen Excel games before. Most were simple affairs based on grids, taking advantage of Excel’s tabular layout – games like Tetris, Battleships and Noughts and Crosses. Most were written in Excel’s Visual Basic for Applications macro language, although some more durable programmers had written entire games using cell functions alone. Some were just Flash games hosted in Excel somehow, which struck me as bare-faced cheating.
I had started my own Excel VBA ripoff of Snake, but became bored with it halfway through, particularly once I’d admitted to myself that I was never realistically going to play it beyond testing, and nor was anyone else likely to want to. There was, nevertheless, a certain triumph in successfully making Excel do something it wasn’t designed to do, and the challenge has been driving me ever since.
Once I realised that shrinking an Excel workbook’s cells down really, really small gave a reasonably high-resolution grid of ‘pixels’ to play with, the colours of which could be changed programmatically, I began to consider the potential for emulating a slightly more advanced 8-bit platform game. Inspired by the smoothness of an Excel Pac-Man clone I came across using this shrunken-cell principle, and having grown up conjoined to my dad’s 48K ZX Spectrum, I decided to have a go at porting an old Speccy favourite of mine – Jet Set Willy. It soon became apparent that making even a simple flip-screener like JSW run at a bearable framerate was going to be difficult.
Excel Games Puzzles
I’m not a programmer by trade, but I have been coding on and off at Hobby Level for years in a few different languages. Upon deciding to do Jet Set Willy, VBA was the language freshest in my mind from efforts to stave off boredom at work, hyper-automating spreadsheets that didn’t really need automating at all, much less hyperbolically. Certainly, they got me nowhere at work, except possibly to be branded as some kind of hopeless sadist. Anyway, once I’d realised the scale of the JSW project I knew it’d benefit from some kind of modularity, and so I exploited VBA’s support for object-orientated programming. Here I decided that sensibly the graphics ‘engine’ – the part I’d started with – ought to remain entirely separate to the game code.
In addition to a (ultimately naive) hope for ease of modification, I hoped this standalone graphics class might eventually power other Excel Spectrum games – even ones written by other people, should other people get sufficiently excited about the idea. And what better way to get people excited about such a pointless endeavour than to explain it long-windedly in an obscure corner of the internet?
Excel Games Not Working
So here is a blog dedicated to the root of the project – XLZX – which will cover my development of XLZX_GFX, a VBA Spectrum-style graphics/render engine class for MS Excel, and, if that ever gets finished, XLZX_SFX, a companion asynchronous Speccy sound emulator class, which currently exists as the merest figment of a very hopeful imagination. Within those confines, future posts will touch upon code/data optimisation and sniff around a couple of Windows API-based hacks, among other things. I’m writing XLZX_GFX in Excel 2007 on a 32-bit Windows machine, but I plan to eventually have it compatible with Excel 2003 and Win64 (or whatever they’re calling it).
Excel Games Free Download
This is my first blog, and also my first internet thing ever, so please be patient with me, as I’m taking most direction on publishing this stuff from my long-suffering girlfriend. Comments and suggestions are welcome; no doubt a popular topic like this will generate massive hysteria, but I’ll attempt to reply to all correspondence that demands it. Thanks for reading – PS