Matt's question reveals a common frustration: you find a piece of code that almost works, and then you spend hours trying to bend it to your will. The script he shared does something genuinely useful, it resizes images and stacks them neatly inside a cell, but it also reveals the fundamental limitation of traditional spreadsheets. The code places images relative to the active cell, but if your macro button sits in a different location, the images land next to the button instead of where you intended. That gap between intention and execution is exactly the problem that legacy tools have never solved well.
This is not a failure of Matt's approach. It is a failure of the tool itself. Spreadsheets were designed for numbers and text, not for visual data. Every image you insert becomes a floating object that the grid treats as an afterthought. You have to write VBA, manage coordinate systems, and manually track positions just to keep a picture inside a cell. And even then, the moment you sort, filter, or resize a column, your carefully placed images scatter. The workaround becomes a full-time job. Matt's code is clever, but it is a patch on a system that was never built to handle this kind of data.
What Matt is trying to do, store multiple images inside a single cell, is exactly the kind of task that an AI-native spreadsheet should handle as a basic feature. Imagine selecting a cell, clicking an insert button, and having images automatically resize, align, and nest themselves inside that cell without any VBA. Imagine that those images stay put when you move the row or change the column width. Imagine being able to reference them in formulas or filter by their presence. That is not a fantasy. It is what happens when you build a spreadsheet from the ground up with images as first-class data types, not afterthoughts.
The practical takeaway here is straightforward: if you are spending time writing macros to manage image placement, you are working against the grain of the tool. Matt's code is a sign of resourcefulness, but it also signals that the tool has not evolved to meet his needs. The next generation of spreadsheets should make this trivial. Until then, the best solution is not more code, it is a platform that treats images with the same respect it gives to text and numbers. Explore what that looks like. Your workflow will thank you.