Beyond the Spreadsheet: 3 Unusual Ways to Use Excel

Excel users often find themselves stuck in a rut, staring at spreadsheets for hours on end. But Tony Phillips, an experienced Microsoft Office user and How-To Geek writer, has discovered that Excel can be so much more than just a tool for crunching numbers. This weekend, he invites readers to take their spreadsheets beyond the grid with three unusual projects.

One of these projects involves turning NASA's daily pictures into an Excel gallery. Using Power Query and the IMAGE function, users can pull in new pictures every day, complete with titles and descriptions. To do this, they'll need to retrieve and transform the data from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website.

Phillips provides a step-by-step guide on how to create this gallery, including how to use Power Query to bring in the necessary fields and how to display the images using the IMAGE function. He also warns users that if Excel keeps changing their column widths when they refresh the data, they should uncheck the 'Adjust column width' option in the External Data Properties window.

But this is just one example of what Excel can do. Phillips encourages readers to experiment with other sources, such as news, sports, and weather data, using the same basic idea behind Power Query.