Using a table (in some form) as desktop background

I have a small table in Excel, it's 10 rows and 25 columns. I would like to overlay this on to my desktop image.

It seems in Vista the only option to have any 'dynamic' content like this would be using sidebar gagets in some form - I don't have the time and or patience to create one from scratch for something not overly critical. So... I thought I'd take the manual route...

I have the desktop image as a JPG, I thought I'd just be able to copy/paste from Excel in paint.net or something, alas it comes with the cell background as white, not transparent, so looks awful.

So, does anyone know how I can overlay a table over a picture, and hence set it as my wallpaper?

It would be a bonus if I could keep an original file where I could edit the table from time to time, even if that meant flattening and exporting each time.

A bit odd but there you go, any ideas with free tools?

what happens if you export to HTML and copy + paste via a browser?

Not the most elegant awnser I grant you, but the problem is Excel uses a DIB on the clipboard which doesn't support transparency, so it has to have a key colour.

As I write that it seams obvious you could set the background to pink or some colour not used, then do a colour replace in Paint.Net that would work.

Failing that gadget developing isn't hard at all. Its quite hard to 'read' other peoples code in this environment, but writing it is easy. Its what some might term write once code.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...67(VS.85).aspx provides an overview
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/gadgets/InsideBar.aspx provides more detail.

You can use the Excel COM api to make it save out an HTML representation easily, then just load that in your gadget.

Thanks for the reply dude, I'll be honest, I'll haev a go with the html copy paste, if that does the job I may leave it at that, if it doesn't or it looks shoddy then I might put the time into creating a gadget - those links certainly look helpful.

Have a look at Rainmeter and the associated skins

:) - That looks really nice - looks a way more excessive than I was thinking of initially, but very nice... I'll take a read on their site - I installed and am trying Samurise, but it seems very clunky and far from obvious.

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Originally Posted by mycarsavw

Have a look at Rainmeter and the associated skins

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oooh I like the look of that, gonna have a play