Linux in Excel? Sure, why not ruin both

The spreadsheet from Hell

From the department of "but… why?" comes news of Linux running in Microsoft Excel, although all might not be as it seems.

There are various painful ways to run Excel on Linux – using a web-version in Edge, a Windows virtual machine, or with WINE, say – but going the other way around and getting the Linux kernel to run in Excel? That takes a special kind of determination.

Microsoft Excel has been put to work in ways Redmond's engineers could never have imagined, which includes running Doom in a spreadsheet. In 2024, the number-crunching software was used to implement a 16-bit CPU, replete with 128 KB of RAM and a 128 x 128 display.

The latest application for Excel is getting Linux going.

However, anyone hoping for a worksheet with some ferociously complicated formulas will likely be disappointed. In this instance, Excel is being used to perform as little more than one of the most unsuitable command-line consoles in history. The real work is being done by a native Windows DLL, called from Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

The VBA macro uses the mini-rv32ima RISC-V emulator, which does most of the heavy lifting here in booting a Buildroot-based instance of 32-bit RV Linux. The output from the emulator is dropped into cells on an Excel spreadsheet, and hey presto – Linux executing in Excel. Or at least, appearing to.

The dependence on VBA and an external DLL means that running this anywhere but on native Windows is a no-no, so no macOS or cloud versions. It's also not particularly usable. The author, NSG650, wrote: "The thing is evidently very buggy but I did not want to spend a lot of time on it. This was done mostly for fun."

"Evidently this was cheating since I did not rewrite the emulator in VBA or Excel formulas," the author added, "but again I wanted to run Linux in Excel and this was one way to do so."

We can't imagine how slowly Linux would boot without "cheating," nor the effort and complexity required to port what the operating system needs to run into Excel formulas. The 16-bit CPU example is hardly a speed demon (although it is a handy educational tool for anyone curious about how things work at the silicon level).

The author, who goes by the online alias NSG650, told El Reg that the project had been tested with Office 2021 LTSC. "It is basically enough to send commands and receive outputs. You won't be able to use tools like vi, but for simple commands it is fine."

NSG650 also gave credit to Enderman for assistance in implementing text input and Cnolhr for work on the RISC-V emulator.

And the future? Don't hold your breath for updates: "I don't plan on adding any more functionality to this since this was done for fun. I don't see a lot of practical use for this. Maybe someone might need Linux running in their spreadsheet, but it's unlikely."

Microsoft did not mention running Linux in its spreadsheet application during this week's "What's New in Excel" post. While ActiveX will be disabled by default, VBA is likely to live on for a while yet. This means that as long as users don't mind allowing a DLL to be called from a macro, they'll still be able to run Linux from Excel. ®