How to Disguise Social Media Sites as MS Word and Excel Files

Using social media at work is a pretty controversial issue. Bosses think that it interferes with work, while workers say that it helps them to concentrate better and stay in touch with the latest trends and news.

But if you have a boss or co-worker who will nag you when they see you are spending time on Twitter or Facebook, we have selected some of the best tips for avoiding this problem and looking more productive by disguising your social media activity as work being done in an MS Office application.

1. Hardlyworking 

This website allows you to log in to your Facebook and Twitter account and follow the latest updates and news. However, what is special about this app is that it looks like MS Excel. So your co-workers might think you are sorting out an Excel table, but really you are spending time on Facebook or Twitter. Go to the website, log in with your either your Facebook or Twitter account, authorize the app, and you are ready to browse freely.

2. Spreadtweet

Spreadtweet is an Adobe Air application which allows you to follow Twitter updates. It is also disguised as Excel. There are no images, everything is displayed as text, and you can choose from a couple of skins, to better camouflage your activities. There are both online and offline versions, if you are not allowed to install additional software at work.

 3. MsWorddit

MsWorddit is Reddit disguised as a Word document. If you are addicted to this website, you’ll definitely find this tool useful. It is mostly suitable for following comments and discussions. When you want to open a stream of comments, click on “Open in new tab” to read them without leaving a current page.

4. Import Web Data into Excel

Everybody agrees that MS Excel is an amazing peace of software. One of the many possibilities that it offers is the ability to insert and regularly refresh data from the Web into Excel spreadsheets. You can read more about it here,  but we will show you how you can import somebody’s tweets into excel and follow them.
First you have to build an RSS feed for a desired account. Just add your username at the end of following string:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=

In our case it looks like this http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=cometdocs
Now go to your Excel table and click on “Data – From Web”.

Paste this URL and click “OK.”
You will now be able to see a list of all tweets coming from this account in your Excel document.
Click on “Data – Refresh All” to import the latest data.