Excel 97 Easter Egg - Flight Simulation
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters link it as a fond example of elaborate hidden Easter eggs in old Microsoft Office.
What it is
A short screen recording of the flight simulator Easter egg hidden in Excel 97, with the steps to trigger it. The uploader notes the mouse controls are hard to handle.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2013 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends plasma · 2013-04 · on “Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?”
Thought the OP meant the actual 3D game engine in Excel 97. Check out [this video] One of the last easter eggs!
Recommends bigjump · 2024-11 · on “'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel”
The flight sim Easter egg baked into Excel 97 got me hooked! [this video] Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!
Cites adiusmus · 2018-09 · on “3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae”
Dangerous is mostly the spaghetti business logic that results when excel spreadsheets get scaled up into systems . “Dangerous” in lighter ways: [this video] Nostalgia requires this... [LINK]
Cites signal11 · 2020-07 · on “Hacking with environment variables”
I suspect what made companies exclude easter eggs was a sense that they were too big and "serious" for this sort of whimsical activity. And specifically for Microsoft, a sense that they were now targeting the Enterprise marketTM and were above all this consumer-grade behaviour. Interestingly Google still has easter egg behaviour for several queries, e.g. askew[1], which fits well with their corporate brand. To be clear, an easter egg is only supposed to be a (pleasant) surprise to the consumer -- not a secret kept from the rest of the team, especially QA. You can and should absolutely test your easter eggs. Yes, Excel's increasingly elaborate easter eggs[2] would probably find it hard to get
Cites al_borland · 2024-08 · on “Ask HN: How did you break out from being a lone developer?”
For me, I leave the big stuff and major contributions to work. I know that after work I don't have the energy to making anything world changing on my own. I read about digital gardening / digital puttering[0] several years back and that resinated with me a bit. I don't necessarily need major projects in my free time; that would feel like a burden on top of my job. What I do instead is have some relatively simple stuff I can putter around with. Add a feature here, refactor some code there, etc. It's not going to change the world, but they are things I find useful or interesting, even if they aren't a big deal. I ran across an interview[1] with James Thomson (developer of PCalc) a while back.