Aspen Red Forest, hand-made entirely with MS Excel 2007
Last week, I shared a pixel art piece I created using MS Paint, and I was truly grateful for the warm response from the community 💖 This time, I took on a new challenge, creating a fully animated pixel art scene using only Microsoft Excel 2007.
Yes, Excel!
Over the past week, I manually filled 320x200 cells, across 20 sheets, using just 9 colors. I then compiled 20 screenshots into a GIF to showcase the animation.
The final artwork exists solely as a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 (.xlsx) file.
His name is XL. He's average clone size, so people are naturally curious about what the name means. They ask if it's a dirty joke about his dingaling.
It's not. He pulls up some files. He's the quartermaster. He uses Space Excel, and it's not CALLED Excel, but he Excels at it. Hence XL.
His friends in two other battalions are Spread and Sheets. All of them get asked the Is It A Dirty Joke question and ALL respond with The Same Fucking Move (files).
White is 0, gray is 1, black is 2. A cell's value is based off of the average (really the sum) of the three cells above. For example, in this rule, the cell will be 0 if the average of the three cells above is 1. The dimensions are 127x63, and edges loop.
Code: =IFS(A2+B2+C2=6,MOD(FLOOR($BL$1/729),3),A2+B2+C2=5,MOD(FLOOR($BL$1/243),3),A2+B2+C2=4,MOD(FLOOR($BL$1/81),3),A2+B2+C2=3,MOD(FLOOR($BL$1/27),3),A2+B2+C2=2,MOD(FLOOR($BL$1/9),3),A2+B2+C2=1,MOD(FLOOR($BL$1/3),3),A2+B2+C2=0,MOD(FLOOR($BL$1/1),3))
(This one is for B3. You just need to "tile" it, but remember to change it for the edges. Cell BL1 is the rule, and row 2 is the "input" (first row))
This has 2187 different rules, this one is rule 1155 with a random input.
This is my first msexcelfractal post, let me know how I did ^_^
@violetfractal
after doing this kind of work for 10 years professionally
it's something incredibly obvious but I was doing it with writing out formulas because I'm too smart for my own good
background:
"upper()" and "lower()" are used on text strings to change the case of the letters. so for example:
upper("apple") = APPLE
lower("Fuck You") = fuck you
and so...
sometimes I would want to make a name like
diane mononym
or
DIANE MONONYM
into
Diane Mononym
and so I would use left() and right() and mid() to pull that shit out carefully and re-assemble it together. I was going to keep it brief because it's a bunch of bullshit but I decided to sit down and write out the formula because the people ought to see bullshit if they really wanted.
below the jump.
before we dive in, let me explain some of the formulas here for your reference.
some stuff with strings:
upper([string])
make the string upper case
lower([string])
make the string lowercase
concatenate([string)
put the contents together as a single string
left([string],[number])
take X-many characters off the left
right([string],[number])
take Y-many characters off the right
trim([string])
remove extra spaces from the string
and some stuff with math:
len([string])
measures how many characters there are in a string
for example: "diane" is five (5) letters long, "mononym" is seven (7) characters long
search([desired character],[string]):
this is used to find a specific character in a string. so like here we'll look for " " the space character. which will denote how far in
number of characters into the string that is
so for example in "diane mononym" the space " " is six (6) characters in, where the name would be split in half
and so the strategy is to split the name into two words, then split the words into two parts, the first letter and the rest of the characters
let me annotate this to explain what's happening here.
here's the formulas, annotated:
A1 ="diane mononym" // I wrote this out
B2 =CONCATENATE( // combine this as one string
UPPER(LEFT(TRIM(LEFT($A$1,SEARCH(" ",A1))))),
// use the space character to find out where the space is and grab the left of the two words, take the first character from the left and make it uppercase
// use the space character to find out where the space is and grab the left of the two words, take the remaining characters from the right and make them lowercase
// use the space character to find out where the space is and grab the right of the two words, take the first character from the left and make it uppercase
// use the space character to find out where the space is and grab the rightof the two words, take the remaining characters from the right and make them lowercase
)
the laborious result:
A1 = diane mononym
B2 = Diane Mononym
This works pretty nicely and with the individual components broken out, you can even do funky stuff like reformat the name to something like
Mononym, Diane
but astute readers will note a specific limitation of this method. what if your person has three names (a middle, naturally),
you are completely shit out of luck.
may as well start this at 9 AM because this is going to take longer than it has to. I am not going today though because getting here writing this has already taken up the better part of an hour.
and I went searching for this because reformatting a name like "KATHERINE HENNESY TEMPO" into "Katherine Hennessy Tempo" would have devoured my soul
but the trick is to use if we're hypothetically tackling this is to be able to count Z-many additional spaces to break up but it's not dynamic. you need to keep adding formulas for each additional segment. hell on earth so let's not
and that's where I arrived at too. hm maybe I'm not too ambitious for my own good.
and so I found it immediately on a brief and mundane stack overflow page. behold. the new formula I did not know existed before today
PROPER()
which does that automatically.
just makes the first letters of a word............ Proper.
