Using MS Excel to catalog your collection

**hellonearth159** · 03-10-2009

A couple of days ago, our benevolent leader Space Ghost requested some tips for using MS Excel to manipulate images and create a log of your collection. Here's my attempt. Please provide feedback and changes as you see fit.

First of all, these steps are for the Office XP version of Excel. The same formatting options exist for Office 2003 and Office 2007 but you may have to do a little digging. Personally, I hate the new 2007 toolbars so I went back to XP. These steps also assume the user has a basic understanding of how to use MS Excel.
Lastly, you can click on the pictures below to see a larger version of them if the resolution is too small.

1. To start with, I usually setup my spreadsheets to have a column width of 8.43 and a height of 175. I found that this size is a reasonable compromise for seeing the details of an image at 100% zoom. To see a large collection, all I need to do is zoom out the picture to around 30%.

2. The next step is to make sure that the tools needed to format pictures are selected on the toolbar options. Make sure the Picture toolbar is checked off as shown below:

3. You can insert pictures into Excel using the Insert File menu option or you can copy/paste a picture from a web site (with permission of course).
To insert a picture from a file, select the Insert --> Picture --> From File menu as shown below.

4. If you want to paste a picture from a web site, you should select Paste Special --> Bitmap to avoid pasting any HTML code attached to the image. Thid can mess up your paste command and can add unwanted scripts to your spreadsheet. I do this with a right-click of the mouse. You could do the same thing from the Edit menu option

Next, we'll review how to correct the orientation and size of a picture and how to crop the background using the picture tools in Excel.