I've seen Excel maps, but they're usually just using each cell, made into a square shape, colored in, so each one is a single pixel.
But these are interesting. I can see how they can be done, but I can see why it wouldn't be the first thing one would think of, considering the hexagons.
I just tried making them in Excel by making diagonal lines across cells. It works, but requires six cells per hexagon (though you can merge the center two, if that matters), though I'm not sure how to go about fully colouring them, unless there's a way to apply two colours to a cell.
I haven't messed around with excel since I retired in 2014. I just have a chromebook now which suits my needs but doesn't lend itself to doing much with excel. I was pretty good at excel back then - mostly because I was thinking of ways to implement it that most people couldn't seem to see (if that makes any sense!) . I supervised a shelving department in a university library and wrote an excel sheet that would analyse the measurements of the available shelf space and break it down via display as far down as each section of shelves (typically 7 shelves) and all levels up above. Which was really useful when we shifted books (which is more or less going on constantly in a library.)
The upshot was that I was always playing with excel and when the 2010 version was implemented I noticed that it had a really obscure function to rotate the cell walls. Which (since I have always liked board games and console games with hex grids) immediately got me to thinking if I could make hex grids. Took me a bit of playing around (the biggest problem was figuring out the column widths to get the hexes to display (more or less) properly. Since Dark Wizard was/is by far my favorite console game I decided to start there. Big project - but I did a couple hours of work on it each night and eventually finished it.
Previous to the 2010 version I had played around with the shape command to do the side cell walls but those are cumbersome to use and I also (like you) couldn't color the individual hexes satisfactorily. I think there is (or have been) actually software programs to make hex maps but I don't know anything about them.
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