Turning JPGs into Excel… because why not? 😂
Sometimes you don’t build things because they’re useful.
You build them because you can.
This is exactly how jpg2xlsx was born.
👉 https://github.com/Tlaloc-Es/jpg2xlsx
💡 The idea
What if… instead of inserting an image into Excel…
we recreated the image using cells?
- Each pixel → one Excel cell
- Each cell → background color of that pixel
- Result → Excel becomes a weird pixel-art renderer
Starting with this
…into this 😅
Yes, this is Excel. No, it was not designed for this.
Yes. It’s as cursed as it sounds.
🧠 How it works (simple version)
The logic is surprisingly straightforward:
- Load the image (PIL)
- Loop through every pixel
- Create an Excel file (openpyxl)
- Paint each cell with the pixel color
That’s it.
No AI. No magic. Just brute force and questionable decisions.
🎨 Example output
You take a small image…
and you get an Excel file that looks correct if you zoom out just enough.
Excel as a rendering engine was not on my bingo card, but here we are.
⚠️ The obvious problem
This approach has a tiny issue:
Excel absolutely hates this.
Let’s do some quick math:
- 100 x 100 image → 10,000 cells ✅ OK-ish
- 500 x 500 image → 250,000 cells 💀
- 1920 x 1080 → don’t even try
Excel becomes slow. Then unusable. Then emotionally distant.
🛠️ The “solution”: --colores
Instead of trying to fight Excel… I cheated 😄
I added a flag:
--colores
What it does
It reduces the number of unique colors in the image.
- Less colors → fewer style combinations
- Smaller file size
- Better performance
- Still looks “good enough”
Basically: controlled visual degradation for survival
🤔 Why this works
Excel doesn’t struggle with cells.
It struggles with too many unique styles.
So by limiting colors:
- We reuse styles
- We reduce memory overhead
- We make Excel slightly less angry
🚀 Why I built this
Not for production. Not for clients.
Just for:
- learning
- experimenting
- having fun
- building weird things
And honestly… those projects are often the most fun.
⭐ If you find it funny/useful
Give it a star, it helps more than you think:
👉 https://github.com/Tlaloc-Es/jpg2xlsx
🧪 Ideas for future chaos
- ASCII mode (Excel as terminal emulator?)
- GIF → multiple sheets
- Google Sheets version
- “Minecraft mode” (limited palette)
🧾 Final thoughts
Not everything needs to scale.
Not everything needs to be useful.
Sometimes:
“This is dumb”
is exactly why you should build it.
If you’ve built something equally unnecessary, I’d love to see it 👇
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