Hi - Dave here.
Happy Friday!
This past week, I finally took a look at Excel's new IMAGE function, which is designed to fetch images from the Internet into Excel with a formula.
What's cool about IMAGE is that it allows you to
programmatically import an image at a known location with
just a formula.
You can see how it works in the worksheet below, where the IMAGE function has been configured to fetch 6 different country flags based on the URLs in column C:
[
Download the workbook and read the full explanation]
Of course, you can manually insert an image into a cell anytime, so why use IMAGE? I think the main use case for IMAGE is importing a larger number of images with a formula that
calculates the path to each image
automatically. It might not matter much for 10 images, but for 100 images or a thousand, this is a big upgrade.
This article walks through the process of creating a formula like this step-by-step. Read the article and download the worksheet to see how it works.
Note: The IMAGE function is only available in Excel 365 for now.
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Have a great weekend!
Dave
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