Weird Computing: As the "can it run Doom" phenomenon clearly demonstrates, people will try to do the weirdest things with extensible, accessible software platforms and applications. Excel, a program with powerful computation capabilities that's been around for almost 40 years, is no different. And it can seemingly run Linux.
A lone developer known as "NSG650" recently unveiled the Linux In Excel project, which, as you might guess, forces the Linux kernel to run within a Microsoft Excel environment.
The project isn't exactly groundbreaking, and the Linux experience it provides is, by the developer's own admission, quite buggy. Nonetheless, it's worth mentioning as yet another hacking feat that no other coder has dared – or even thought – to attempt.
Linux In Excel leverages mini-rv32ima, an open-source project designed to implement the RISC-V instruction set in an emulated environment. The mini-rv32ima emulator provides a partial RISC-V implementation. It consists of about 400 lines of actual code and is built as a single DLL program that can be easily managed as a simple external dependency.
All things considered, NSG650 created a VBA macro that loads the mini-rv32ima emulated environment into Excel, captures its output, and writes it into the spreadsheet's cells. The developer admits to "cheating," as he didn't rewrite the emulator in VBA or Excel formulas – a theoretically achievable goal given enough time, resources, and stubborn determination.
Still, Linux In Excel manages to provide a buggy, slow, yet "authentic" Linux shell experience. Another developer, Enderman, contributed by adding proper input support and recorded a YouTube video explaining how he ran Linux in Excel while struggling with VBA's syntax.
Microsoft Excel can be considered as the major computing and calculation platform of the software world. Despite its many limitations and inaccuracies with very long numeric values, Redmond's legendary product is routinely exploited to run weird hacks and projects such as a fully functioning 16-bit CPU.
Furthermore, NSG650 has been working to bring the Linux kernel to the most unconventional computing environments imaginable. In 2023, the programmer developed the BugCheck2Linux utility, which runs Linux after Windows crashes to a BSOD. Even then, NSG650 relied on readily available open-source projects like mini-rv32ima and ReactOS to achieve his goal.
Someone tried, and mostly managed, to run Linux in an Excel spreadsheet
