Proficient Drawing w Excel in 30 minutes!

Using Microsoft Excel as a drawing tool is a surprise to most of us. When we think of using Excel, we think of creating a spreadsheet and maybe if we are adventurous creating a graph. But there is a hidden power contained in Excel, the ability to draw. One of my most popular blog post of all time, Draw your Value Stream Map in Excel includes a You Tube video of the rendering of a Excel drawing depicting Transformer (You remember the Children’s heroes). If you need proof take a look at these drawings from The Spreadsheet Page:

It turns out that Debbie is an artist, and she uses Excel as her primary drawing software (now that’s odd!). The figure below shows an example. The image on the left was scanned from a catalog. The image on the right was created by Debbie, using Excel’s drawing tools. The drawing consists of hundreds of individual shapes, combined together.

According to Debbie, “Most of my drawings do not take longer than two hours or four hours max to get the outlines done and the fill colors put in. I often use photographs that I’ve scanned and inserted into Excel, then I use the drawing tools to change the photographs into drawings. As you have already noticed I’ve become quite proficient at drawing on Excel, so it doesn’t take me as much time as it did when I first started, now that I’ve figured out all the tricks.

I have a tendency to use other more “graphic” software packages in lieu of Excel but I am amazed at the simplicity of using Excel once you start. Why should I care? Most of the tools of Lean are visual in nature. In fact, one of the sayings that have been very common in Lean is “If you’re not visual, you’re not Lean.” However, in Lean and with any continuous improvement methodology metrics are important. So, if you want to be successful you cannot divorce the visual aspect and the metrics. Excel offers the marriage between the two.  Listen to the advantages described by Dean Ziegler of Systems2win: