My happy little snail!

What’s not to love about snails? They are perfect in every snail-ish way. There really isn’t much more I can say except looking at this should make you happy.

Assignment-

For the assignment, Spreadsheet Invasion, I had to reclaim Excel and make it fun again and create an animation using colored Excel cells.

How I made it-

I used the suggestion from How not to choose a design assignment, to turn cells into squares before I began. It wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be since I only have a basic knowledge of Excel.

The cell height and width on the initial page are obviously not in the same units, but I learned from Set Excel Cell as A Square how to change my view to page layout. In that view, cell width and height were displayed in uniform units.

I wanted the page set to landscape, but I wasn’t sure how to do this. When I typed landscape into the search feature, it changed to it automatically.

I just played around and came up with the delightful scene of a snail crawling across the ground. It took a while to do the original picture. The next 13 worksheets (making a grand total of 14) were mostly copying, pasting, and doing some adjustments.

I wanted to give photopea a try, and so I found this video about how to make a gif there.

After exporting the Excel files as PDFs, you simply layer the files in the correct order, then go back and add _a_ to the beginning of the file name for each layer. Then you export the files as a gif file. You can adjust the quality and speed before you save your file.

Overall

This took a lot of time, but it was a lot of fun and I love my snail.

So I told myself: I’ll do a design assignment. I’ll click the random button and do whichever on it gives me. So what do I get? The Spreadsheet Invasion. What the heck should I do with that? And how the heck do I do it? I though of that Mr. X image I used with this week’s assignments, the skyline reflected in his glasses, and how the geometricness of it lended itself to a spreadsheet grid. OK, I could even call that an 80s tie-in. Then it occurred to me to try to animate a sunrise. I built the skyline in Excel by filling cells with black. Once I had that done I realized I could animate it by making new worksheets and copying the previous one in, sort of like flip animation. Now I had a plan and felt like I knew what I was doing. I made the gradation in the sky using the standards colors. Looking back, I should have looked into customizing the color palette. I’ve never done that with Excel. I’m assuming it’s possible, but you never know with Microsoft. I copied my first scene and made a new worksheet and pasted it in. Then I made adjustments – bring the sun up, move the gradation up, repeat. I made 8 worksheets. Now how do I animate it? I thought about doing a screen grab (Cmd+Shift+4) for each worksheet, but then I’d have to try to make them all the same size, and fail and then try to cover for it. I didn’t see an option in Excel to export a worksheet as an image. So I used Quicktime to do a screen recording and flipped through the worksheets. I’d still have to do some cleanup though, so I took another look for an export option. I highlighted all the cells on the screen and copied. Then I went into Photoshop to create a new image.

The preset size said Clipboard, so I knew I could just paste my selection as an image. I went back and copied the cells from each worksheet in the same manner, and pasted each selection into my image, which by default made a new layer each time.

This is what needed to animate it as a GIF.

I created a frame animation on the timeline, and used the Make Frames from Layers option. I set the frame timing to .5 seconds and used the Save for Web option to make it a GIF.

As far as animations go, it’s kinda lame, but then if we wanted something of quality we wouldn’t be using Excel. I think it’s not so much a design challenge as a problem-solving one. And on that level it succeeds. Looking back, there are a lot of things I could have done differently to make it better. I could have made the cells more square, so they look more like pixels. Then I could have had lights in the windows, and had them turn off as the sun rose. I also could have Googled Excel animation and not have to invent a process on the fly, but I suppose that would have been less of a learning experience. What can I do with my newly developed skill? Damned if I know.