Results tagged “excel”

One of my recurring fascinations is people creating works of art using common productivity software. Office Tools of Expression as a review of this medium that I wrote last year, and Excel Pile offered an overview back in 2004.

Today, the idea of using office software as a means of expression is popping up more and more frequently. Danielle Aubert released 16 Months Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel about two years ago, as a fifty-dollar coffee table book offering exactly what the title suggests. Writer Response Theory presented a terrific overview of the work at the time, as well as an interview with Aubert:

I started making Excel drawings, never spending more than 30-40 minutes on each one, and I tried not to get hung up on whether I was making non-representational versus representational versus abstract versus systems versus typographic drawings. I just made drawings about anything that I thought might be pleasing in some general way. After a while I started to copy one day’s drawing into a spreadsheet for the next day’s drawing because I found that that way the drawings could build on themselves and maybe become a bit more complex. But really my main objective when I began making them was to experiment with making ’small art’ - or the equivalent of my friend’s small poems - in Excel.

And then, for the holidays this year, the Google Docs team has gotten into the game. They've released "Collaborative Spreadsheet Art", a winter-themed piece created by four artists working simultaneously in the web-based spreadsheet app. The introductory movie is only a minute long.

The Google Docs holiday site offers more insights into the creation of the work, including a look behind the scenes. Now I'm just waiting for the various web-based art programs to make performance videos of people using their tools to do calculations and analyze data.

If you're really taken with this stuff, my earlier post gathers up a list of interesting links about office app art.

One of my favorite posts that I've ever written was Excel Pile, about people's propensity for using Office tools like Microsoft Excel to track mundane parts of their lives, or even as tools of artistic expression. From that post three years ago:

[A]lmost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss's mood. There's no end to the ways one can misuse desktop applications in one's personal life.

The team behind Microsoft Office for the Mac has built a site called Art of Office around exactly this concept. I had intended, with that original Excel Pile post, to make a site (called Office Pile, actually) which would let people share and collaborate around these kinds of expressive documents, and it's exciting to see that someone has done exactly that. At Microsoft, no less! They describe the site well:

Art of Office is for Mac users pushing the boundaries of what can be done in Mac Office. Explore. Contribute. Reuse. Remix. Add your best work. Take what you like (giving credit where it's due) and make it yours.

Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo created some postcards in MacWord, Phil Torrone made a 361-slide PowerPoint deck of illegal primes, and Pixelfreak made (what else?) pixel art in Excel. I dig it.

Blog readers who liked this post also enjoyed:

• Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, David Byrne's PowerPoint-as-art effort, released as a book that comes with a CD of the presentation. I had a chance to see the man himself present some of the slides at the book's launch,and quite enjoyed it. See also the official EEII site and a 2003 Wired story on the piece.
• Excel Pile: 130 different comments about how people use office apps in their personal lives.
• Office 2007 is the bravest upgrade ever, where I wrote about how ambitious I think the most recent version of Microsoft Office is, and inspired endless flames.
• Two posts about a press story on the recreational use of office software.
• And one to miss Leslie with: Click To Add Title, Leslie Harpold and Michael Sippey's seminal PowerPoint competition.

End of slide show, click to exit.

A few weeks ago, I'd noted a Globe and Mail story that described Excel expertise as if it were a new fashion trend. That tickled my fancy, and I think the article turned out great.

However, there were a bunch of questions that Tralee Pearce, the story's author, asked me which didn't make the cut for the newspaper. Since I'd taken the time to write out answers, I thought I'd share them with you. Tralee graciously gave me permission to reprint the questions on my own blog.

Q: Okay, first off, what's it really like to be an Excel Ninja?

A: I am not sure I'm a ninja, but... Mostly, it's fun being able to make a tool do whatever you want. Anybody who's been a computer programmer or even who's done a do-it-yourself project at home knows that feeling of satisfaction that comes from finally making something just work. Of course, it's a little less fun if you're the person everyone is asking to help troubleshoot their problem with a spreadsheet.

Q: What do you do with Excel - work and/or play?

A: These days it's a mix of both. Work is the usual analysis, comparisons, reporting, or list management stuff that people tend to do with spreadsheets. A lot more fun is the crazy ways that both my wife and I, as well as a lot of our friends, find for using these "serious" tools.

Q: When did you get hooked on the possibilities?

A: I think I was very young, maybe 7 or 8, when I was first helping my father with some spreadsheets he was working on. This was on a Commodore 64, and I was just so excited about the fact that I could take the simple math skills that I had and turn them into something so limitless. That's probably still the reason it's fun to me.

Then, when I got a little older, I read about the people who'd invented the first spreadsheet programs, and how they'd also invented a lot of the ideas behind the computer software industry as a whole. Without them as pioneers, I couldn't have the job I have today, and I'm extremely fortunate to get to have met a lot of these people, who are still alive, still working actively in creating new software, and still mentoring geeks like me who grew up using their work. (Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet, has been active in blogging and podcasting from the beginning. And Ray Ozzie, who helped popularize spreadsheets with Lotus 1-2-3 just replaced Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect of Microsoft.)

Q: The web link you sent [referring to Excel Pile] is two years old. Of course I'm late in reporting on all this - but do you sense a mainstreaming of Excel lifestyle uses outside the computer programmer/engineer crowd? I have friends who plot wardrobes, wedding and rsvp lists all the time. I feel like I haven't heard that so much....

A: I think there are lots of people who use these tools to plan their important events, or even for recreation. They're so powerful and so adaptable, and people are familiar with them from their day jobs; It's only natural they'd take them home to use them there as well.

Q: Why Excel? Why is it such a lovable program?

A: I think there's a lot of reasons people use Excel in unexpected ways. The first is that we're wrongly taught that software is "serious" and should only be used for practical purposes. Technology is just as creative a medium as any other, and people have an inherent desire to express themselves. My sister's made art with Excel by coloring in the cells. She's self-conscious about it because it seems kind of silly, but I think you could definitely take it seriously. So there's a subversive element to using a business tool that way.

There's also the immense degree of personalization and customization that this kind of office software lets you do. You can really make it your own space, just like you do with your physical space in an office. Nothing says potential like a blank white sheet, and that's why Excel is compelling. Nobody thinks it's strange that graph paper makes you want to doodle; This is a digital representation of the same urge.

Q: You're down on Power Point? Why?

A: I wouldn't say I'm down on PowerPoint. I'd say that historically, it's made it very easy for people to make their communications worse. The tool focused on making all kinds of presentational tricks possible, without focusing on whether those effects were meaningful. And the fact that most people aren't designers meant that you ended up with slide shows that were worse than just hearing someone tell their own story in their own voice without needless adornment.

Tools influence content. Blogs encourage people to share with others in a way that gets a conversation going. Spreadsheets encourage people to create an organized, structured space that can make complicated information seem more approachable. PowerPoint has, until very recently, been designed to help people communicate like cave men: in short, grunting sentences accompanied by crude illustrations.

I'm also just picky because I spend a lot of time doing presentations and public speaking and I think it's like any other craft; You get much better at it the more you do it, and most people just don't do it often enough to justify using a tool as fraught with potential failures as PowerPoint. On the other hand, the upcoming version of PowerPoint is so dramatically improved that I think it will actually make meetings less painful all over the world, once people start to upgrade.

Q: What's a beginner to do? I stare at the Excel on my desktop and I don't know where to start.

A: It's a very forgiving medium! There's an undo button that lets you back out of any mistake, and you can save at any point. So first, be fearless. Second, think of all the times that people insisted that you'd never use the math you learned in school -- this is your chance to prove them wrong! And then don't think so much about formulas and mathematical expressions, because that's not what most people use spreadsheets for anyway. Think about lists and tables.

Once you've got a body of information that you want to organize, you can start to think about formatting and automation. You color the borders and cells and other pieces to look like you want, and then you add little bits of logic to make some magic happen. Whether that's creating a chart or dropping in a few simple formulas, it's pretty easy to use the built-in help and turn a simple to-do list into a color-coded, progress-charting life improvement system.

Q: That said, how do you know when to stop?

A: The new version of Excel supports a million rows. That seems like a decent limit. :)

It's an all-Office day today. The Globe and Mail embraces the bad pun with "Stressed? Busy? Excel-erate your life". Tralee Pearce amusingly asserts that "The must-have fall accessory is your desktop spreadsheet program":

This fall's coolest accessory is not a trophy handbag, a designer shoe or a pair of skinny jeans. It's a computer program sitting right there on your desktop.

Sure, you use your Microsoft Excel to track business expenses and create spreadsheets by day. But legions of Excel-literates are databasing their lives, charting their wardrobes, dinner-party menus and DVD collections by night.

My only lament is that there's no link to the canonical post about people geeking out in Excel.