When I first saw an image of Tatsuo Horiuchi’s work, I was certain that he either painted it or used some well-known program like Illustrator. Then I discovered that he actually uses Microsoft Excel to make everything come to life and it made the whole thing even more impressive than it already is. Because, who does that?

According to a translation by Kotaku, Horiuchi chooses to use Excel because other programs tend to be more expensive and the spreadsheet program came preinstalled on his PC. The idea that Excel could create such beautiful art also came about when he saw coworkers drawing graphs and quite interestingly, he also found it to be “easy to use and more capable than actual paint.”

While it might be easy to say that there are countless of open source software for creating art that Horiuchi could easily download for free, he also felt like doing something new after retiring from his job. And with art like this created using a program designed for spreadsheets, I think he’s succeeded.

[via PC Online, Kotaku]