You don’t have to very creative for drawing paintings in Excel - it just requires patience and some time. For this example, we’ll paint a Google Logo in Microsoft Excel by tracing an existing JPG image. Here’s how the final artwork will look like inside Excel.

How to Create Excel Art

Step 1: Select the entire spreadsheet, right click and set the Row Height as 10 pixels. Now right clicks any of the column headers and set the column width as 2 pixels.

Step 2: Set the zoom level of the spreadsheet to around 60%.

Step 3: Go to Page Layout -> Background and set the background image as the Google Logo. We’ll use it as a tracing image.

Step 4: Now click any of the cells that lies above the “G” symbol and set the fill color (paint bucket icon) same as the color of “G”. Copy that cell and paste it all over G. You may change the fill color to lighter shades around the edges to slightly reduce the staircase like pixel effect.

Step 5: Follow the same with other symbols but remember to replace the fill colors accordingly. Once done, delete the background image.

Also see: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

Here’s a screencast video of the steps created inside Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Speed painting in Microsoft Excel