Sooo, I’ve been busy. Haven’t had the sort of time I’d like to put towards this class, but I’m here with another edition of “Take One” (I’m working on leaving some assignments, I swear!).

This week, I decided to try my hand on Spreadsheet Invasion, mostly because it sounded deceptively sinister.

Anyways, the concept was simple enough: create an animation using Excel.

Thankfully, I have a copy of Excel installed, but to make this assignment a little easier to do I did go out and download a few tools. First off, I wanted something that would auto save my print screens, so I could quickly take a screen shot for each frame.

After some googling, I found FastStone Screen Capture, which did the very simple job of saving my screenshots to a folder every time I hit print screen.

Next, well, was actually taking the screenshots. Not too hard in itself, but it was a little tedious.

Earlier in the course we had a GIF-making assignment, and since then I’ve forgotten the tool that I used to compile photos into a GIF, but after a quick few searches I found the necessary tools.

Copying my files to my Linux VM, I used a nifty little tool called ImageMagick to first convert each .PNG to a .GIF, and then another tool called Gifsicle to compile those images into one GIF.

Thanks to those tools, what could’ve been a very tedious process boiled down to typing two different command-line operations.

Anyways, here’s my animation, appropriately titled “DS106 on FIRE!”.

note: to see the animation, click on the picture!