OK, I can't decide whether this download demonstrates the great power of Microsoft Excel, or if this is the supreme example of someone with incredibly too much time on his hands. Either way, this is probably the coolest Microsoft Excel file ever! I mean, I was playing one of my childhood favorite arcade games, Pacman, but in Microsoft Excel. Did you hear what I said? Pacman, in Excel!

I always knew that you could do over a million things (so it seems) with Excel; but this accomplishment takes it up a notch for me. The credit belongs to Nobuya Chikada, known as the "Japanese Excel Crazy Guy", who basically wanted to see if it could be done. After two years, I guess he found out he could. Here's his reason for doing it:

I'm very happy if you feel Excel & VBA has an infinite possibility! For all I know, It must be meaningful that makes the program works on Excel!!

Excuse the broken English, but you know what he's trying to say. Seeing this Excel file will definitely open you eyes to how you can take advantage of Microsoft Office; because if he can recreate Pacman with Microsoft Excel, what could you do with it?

However, you will have to enable macros on this file for the game to work; you'll also notice the hour glass working harder than normal - which is due to the file refreshing the screen to make everything move. Other than that, here's to childhood memories! Nice work, Nobi!

Download Pacman for Excel

Matt H. Evans, CPA, CMA, CFM has shared his knowledge in financial management for several via his website ... which attracts over 100,000 visitors per week. And from the very beginning, he has offered free Excel spreadsheets that you can download to perform several tasks (i.e. cash flow analysis, stock value, capital budgeting, etc.)

Matt's spreadsheets have always been a great example of how you can use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to their full potential. In addition to his own spreadsheets, this section now includes spreadsheets from other sites. Those interested in these downloads will also find the remainder of his website a very useful resource in financial management.

Spreadsheet programs (like Microsoft Excel) are built and optimized for solving complex math problems. But I would guess that the percentage of people that use them for that are less than 0.1 %. Instead, spreadsheets are widely used for organizing data; which is logical since data is usually organized into tables - which is essentially what a spreadsheet is - a big table (or grid). Plus, spreadsheet programs a lot easier to work with than database programs, which makes programs them the popular choice for presenting data.

The nice thing about Microsoft Excel nowadays is that you can organize your data and use it to produce a useful document. Below is an example of a spreadsheet I used to create a basketball league for a youth church league that I ran. I used the same spreadsheet document to list out the teams & dates and to figure out the game schedule by moving teams around. Then applied a small amount of formating it and used it to generate a PDF document of the schedule that I distributed to the coaches.

Basketball Schedule

Obviously, the possibilities are endless. There are many more examples of how you can use Microsoft Excel to produce documents that are quite useful. I will continue to share them as fast as I can. Of course, if there are other documents that you would like to see, be sure to request them here.

When it comes to offering help on documents, advice and suggestions are always good to have; but nothing beats actually having samples of what you're talking about.  I'm excited about bringing back the ability to download free Microsoft Office documents (and other form and publication samples that you can actually use to create your own.

Therefore, I have added this entry where anyone could post a comment expressing what types of documents they would like to see available in the Document Gallery.  This will be a great benefit for me to know how I can best serve those that visit BetterDocuments.

I look forward to seeing an ever-growing wishlist of documents that will help all of us for years to come.