Listen to music and watch videos in Microsoft Excel

Oct 22, 2014 12:30 GMT  ·  By

There are many companies out there trying to boost productivity and enhance security by limiting access to web services and a number of local applications, but it’s no surprise that skilled employees manage to bypass all these restrictions in ways that could surprise pretty much everyone out there.

Case in point is this media player built entirely in Microsoft Excel and allowing you to listen to your favorite music or watch videos without any other software solution than the famous productivity suite.

While this could sound impossible to many, all you need are two different Excel spreadsheets that contain the complete code for not only listening to music and opening videos, but also creating full playlists.

Of course, it could be really difficult to bring your music at work given the fact that you’re working on a locked-down machine, but it’s still good to know that playlist support is there in case you need it.

How’s this possible?

First and foremost, why do you need such a tool? The answer is as simple as it could be: in some corporations, employees work on locked-down machines that do not allow them to connect to the Internet or launch certain apps, such as Windows Media Player.

Since Microsoft Office is one of the most popular productivity solutions out there and most companies have it, an Excel-based media player definitely comes in handy and helps you bypass restrictions.

The project was entirely made by Reddit user AyrA_ch, who also released two different versions of the spreadsheet (one for 32-bit and another one for 64-bit installations).

As he says in a short post, he was working on a computer without access to Windows Media Player and the only browser he had was Internet Explorer 7 with no plugins and HTML5 support. Given the fact that there was an app monitoring CPU usage, watching a video in Microsoft Excel was the most effective solution to keep out of sight when it comes to scripts that could detect “unallowed” activity.

Improvements on their way

The original Excel-based media player will receive more features soon, the high-skilled developer says, including volume controls and a save feature “that also saves the position of the active item.”

At this point, the supported video formats depend on codecs available on the system, but the most common extensions should be compatible from the get-go thanks to Windows Media Player.

The same Reddit user also created an Excel-based browser that runs entirely in Microsoft’s spreadsheet solution, but no download links are available for the time being.