#leftindexphalanges

[korre]

Hi there! Your stats on Swedish language fics are super interesting. :) May I ask a shallow, only somewhat related question? How'd you make the graphics with the pretty flags? I feel like I really need to learn how to do this and Google is giving me unhelpful stuff. Thanks and have a great day!

Hi! Thank you so much!

It’s a great question, not shallow at all. I find that making my stats pretty and playing with layouts, colours and fonts is the highlight of the statistical process. :)

This might be a longer answer than you expected or might have wanted - so consider yourself warned.

I do all ofmy graphs and data analysis in Excel – I love all the things you can easilycustom. I don’t know how much you have worked with Excel, so this will be avery thorough tutorial. My Excel is in Swedish, but I hope that my explanationswill be good enough so that there is no confusion. Another thing to note isthat I use Excel 2013, and there are differences between the versions, and myoperating system is Windows.

When I have my data, Imark the data I want to use and go to the tab “Insert” and choose the pie chartoption.

I choose apie chart and it pops up.

NowI want a different layout, so I press the layout option and choose the one Iwant. Here, I’ve chosen one that have the explanation (countries in this case)in the data label together with the percentage.

Then I markall the data labels by clicking one of them.

I rightclick and choose the option “Format data labels” and the bar to the right showsup.

Then I tickthe box that says “Value” under “Label contains” (because I want the number offics as well as the percentage in my data labels). Under “Label position” Ichoose “Outside”.

This is to get the labels out of the way. Now they’re in a giant mess, though, butthat can be fixed by just dragging them into the positions you want. Then Iclick on one of the pieces of the pie chart. This will mark the pie chart as awhole.

To justmark a single piece – just click the same piece again.

Now, whenyou have one piece marked (here I have the Russian piece). Right click on thepiece and you get a menu. Here, choose “Filling”.

Then youget this menu, with a lot of options like colours, tinted colours, or – the onewe’re after – “Picture…”.

In myversion of Excel I get this box by clicking “Picture…”. It wants me to choosefrom a picture I have saved on my computer or use Bing picture search to findone. I think older versions might just have the option to choose a picture fromyour computer and by cliciking “Picture…” you will automatically open yourpicture folder.

Then youjust choose a picture you want and your result will be that the piece of thepie chart now will be filled with the picture you choose.

Then you dothe same with the next pie chart piece. You click it to mark the next one instead of the one you already have filled.

Then youright click, choose “Filling”, then “Picture…” and you choose the picture youwant.

Here I wanta picture of the Spanish flag for the Spanish piece of the pie chart. Then you do the same for the third (the Chinese piece in my case). But below you cansee that I just got a red part of the flag, and unfortunately once I’ve choosena picture I can’t change what part of the picture end up as a filling.

So what Idid was that I saved a picture of the Chinese flag on my computer and rotatedit 90° like this:

And then Iused this rotated flag as the picture to fill the piece. Then we at least gotto see some of the stars.

You can dothe same thing to other diagrams – as I did with the Nordic languages. I markmy data and choose a diagram.

Here, Ichoose one that have 3D-effects. Then I click twice on a bar to mark it.

Then, rightclick on the bar and choose “Filling” and “Picture…”.

Then it lookssomething like this.

I wasn’thappy with that result so I saved pictures of the Nordic flags and rotated them– just like I did with the Chinese one. And I got this result instead:

Which I thoughtwas an improvement.

I hope thiswill help you and that I made this guide understandable and not too boring.

If you oranyone else have more questions about my graphs, analysis or data – you’re verymuch welcome to ask, and I will answer as soon as I can!

[slayerkitty]

Sometimes I forget that a I wrote a fic where I had a gay, atheist and misanthropic neurosurgeon go into witness protection and be put in hiding as a priest. 

[silasbotwn]

Hello! I love your blog and more specifically, all the pretty Weeds GIFs. Is there any chance you could tell me how you achieve that sort of smokey coloring effect that you've used in most of your recent posts? Is it just the coloring or textures, too? Sorry, I am a complete newbie at this, but I'd love to learn. (Links to tutorials would be most welcome, of course, or even just some terms that I could punch into Google.) Thank you!

I’m so sorry I never responded to this and I know it’s incredibly late but if you’re still wondering I was using psds and textures from this amazing pack (x) If you see the white psd, with the red eye crossing, I used the texture from there and just messed around with settings for the others. Most of the coloring didn’t change really just the texture gave it that effect. However on most of the gifs I used Topaz (even though you don’t normally see that on gifs) simply because it made the quality a bit better. Hope that helped so sorry it’s late.