In 2024, Spotify Advertising and FCB New York challenged us with something that had never been done before: build a complete, fully playable music video inside a single Excel file (under 10MB) that could be safely emailed, opened, and experienced by media planners anywhere in the world.

What followed became the most technically demanding project in Uncharted Limbo Collective’s history. Excel was never meant to be a real-time audio-visual engine, so we had to re-engineer the medium from the ground up, inventing custom systems, tools, and workflows at every step, using only native spreadsheet functionality.

To make Spreadbeats possible, we:

• Engineered frame-accurate audio–video synchronization inside Excel

• Built a keyframe-based timeline editor entirely within the spreadsheet

• Created a custom animation system driven by formulas and cell states

• Achieved a stable 12 FPS video playback on a 256 × 256 pixel grid

• Designed a bespoke Excel-native video codec to compress and render footage within spreadsheet limits

• Repurposed line charts as a real-time drawing engine for animated visuals

• worked around the different playback and deployment limitations between Excel for Mac and Excel for Windows

Every frame, beat, and transition was processed and played back inside Excel through a purpose-built stack of cells, formulas, charts, VBA macros and custom C++ code - without relying on external video players or other not Excel-native gimmicks.

The result was Spreadbeats: the world’s first full music video built and experienced entirely inside Excel.

The project has received over 100 awards across 2024 and 2025, including:

• Cannes Lions Grand Prix — Digital Craft

• Best of Show — The One Show

• D&AD Black Pencil

• 15 D&AD Pencils

• 4 Grand Clios

• Grand Music Clio

Spreadbeats transformed one of the most familiar workplace tools into an unexpected creative platform, expanding the boundaries of what code, craft, and music video production can be.