Img2xls – Convert images to colored cells in an Excel spreadsheet

This is a cute hack, but why? (Mostly because it doesn't take into consideration using text glyphs _inside_ each cell and a second color to add texture)

Come on, let's go full libaa!

j_s• 11 years ago

Back in the day, one way to 'protect' images online was to table/div-ize them. This is apparently still a thing for email and web ads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442041

atourgates• 11 years ago

I tried this out - but it looks like the images are squished. In a 600x422 image I tried, the columns were originally .03" in Excel. Adjusting them to .1" seemed to fix the perspective.

I just want to alert people to a bug in this piece of software they'll doubtless be using in mission-critical applications.

Dobiasd5• 11 years ago

Thanks. Up to now I only tested with Libre Office.

Dobiasd5• 11 years ago

The bug is fixed now. ;) You can select the output format via command line.

xtrumanx• 11 years ago

Last time I came across this idea (2011) a I made my own version that rendered to html. Upload an image, place each pixel's rgb value in a 2d array, send it back to the client as a html table where each cell's background color is set to a pixel's rgb value. It comes out looking blocky and I couldn't figure out why.

Here it is: http://excelimagemaker.apphb.com/

Pretty sure Excel supports copy-pasting a table from the browser directly into Excel so you can do that too and just set each cell's height and width to 1px to see the image in Excel.

Img2xls – Convert images to colored cells in an Excel spreadsheet

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