lifehacker.com: I like to think I’m pretty decent with Excel. I know my way around a pivot table, I love automating anything and everything with formulas and conditional formatting, and I am as skilled with a vlookup as the awesome new xlookup. Excel macros, however, are an entirely new ball game, and I only wish I could do what Dylan Tallchief does with them.
8 comments:
This concept is so cool! Like the author of the article, I have a good understanding of Excel. There is nothing I love more than a well-organized spreadsheet, integrating formulas, conditional formatting – it makes mundane tasks such as taking attendance at rehearsal so much more fun. However, I have no experience with macros. To be entirely honest, I didn’t know that Excel even had macros. I was so fascinated by the drum machine that I just had to download the file myself. I tried to open it and play around with the drum machine, but, to my dismay, it didn’t work. It gave the option to debug, but that just took me to the macro editor and I had no idea what any of the code meant. In the end, I think the problem that I was facing was that I have Office Home and Student 2016, whereas the file was made on Office Home and Student 2019. Seeing as I don’t want to spend another $150 to upgrade to virtually the exact same software, just watching the demo video will have to do for me. Regardless of using it or not, it is still an amazing concept.
This is an impressive feat of programming. Especially for a program as simple at Excel. Normally I expect to see like a 50,000 bar spreadsheet regarding cues, whether it be lights, sound, or in my case media. Essentially, what I’m getting is that each box is registered to administer a sound effect through the user’s speaker, but I’m curious how the creator warped excel to connect to the user’s sound system. I didn’t think that Excel automatically had connection permissions to sound systems (speakers, microphones, etc.). Maybe it’s automatically programmed, maybe it’s input to include these cues. Either way, the program is rather cool. I’m curious how I might learn how to do this sort of thing on my own. It seems like being computer-savvy is a pretty useful thing overall, and even just basic programming could be incredibly good to know. My roommate for instance is quite good at programming in Java, Python, etc. and it’s proved useful just in his daily life too. Comp sci hmu.
This is a really amazing creation with Excel. I always knew that Excel was a powerful software (as opposed to Google Sheets), but I never knew that it could do this type of programming. People pay thousands of dollars in order to get good audio softwares, and while this is definitely more underdeveloped than those are, this is a really unique drum machine software. I am sure this was very inexpensive to create, and would allow for a cheap solution for an easy drum machine. Also, this just shows the power of Excel. I always thought it was a software for handling datasets and I never was aware that it could actually play sounds. I am really interested in how far one could take the Excel software. I am sure someone will release something that completely blows all of our minds again just because of how much Excel can actually handle.
It is always super cool to see art pop up out of things you never though could be used in a creative way. Like, who looked at excel and said, "Oh yeah this is perfect for music". It certainly resembles what you might see on a drum pad matrix or something out of a dedicated DAW, but we still associate spreadsheets with accounting, business, and other more mundane tasks. Getting used to programming macros can be one of the biggest leaps you can make when it comes to excel programming, since it gives you such an incredible way of manipulating data, even something as simple as an 'x' in a cell corresponding to a sound played through the speakers. Maybe this will inspire someone to look under the hood at Excel's VBA editor and dig a little deeper, or maybe its just a fun way of messing around in a cubical when you're supposed to be working on other spreadsheets. Art can be found in some of the craziest places, and excel has just been added to that list.
This is so cool! I do not have a lot of computer skills, but I have made a habit of trying to cultivate my skills in spreadsheets and Excel because I find the math and functions to be absolutely fascinating. Macros have been out of my wheelhouse because my excel knowledge comes from the content of Production Resource Management and my personal time messing around with function. Building something like this is way out of my wheelhouse – coding is a world that I have only ever dipped my toes in and while I would be interested in learning more to expand my abilities in these types of programs or for things like Arduino, I have not committed the extra time to learn a coding language on my own. The work that this programmer did was awesome. The catch that he made with the timing of beats in the program – expanding the program to have multiple functions to get around the delay of code having to loop slowing down the beats as time goes on. I hope to be as skilled in something as this person is at coding in excel one day.
Earlier this week I fell into a rabbit hole trying to prove that Excel is also a viable tool for statistic to my friend, and look, it is also an instrumental application! What I am arguing is that for all the basic functions Excel has, it has all the potentials and possibilities to be the foundation of many designated, or more advanced programming system. It will be wrong if I claim it to be the best tool of anything other than making spreadsheets(and most likely it is not), but by utilizing everything it has it can go much, much further than it seemed to be capable of. I remembered reading an article about how a Japanese grandfather drawing with the functions in Excel, and the outcome was fantastic. Though the process is less than reasonable, but sometimes simplicity beats everything. Everyone had the experience of doing it stupid way, and when it happened we just had to do it. Solute to all the hardcore grind we did, my fellow artists.
I'm not someone who is really well versed in Microsoft Excel, so reading about things that people do with it regularly is somewhat daunting, let along reading about something like this. It is really amazing to see what people can do with things that are not necessarily designed for that purpose. The fact that someone is able to find a way to do something like this with a tool that is meant for data is just fascinating. I watched some of the YouTube video and I was very surprised to see how long it was and how complicated the person making the video was making this Excel software. It is very interesting to see things like this because it is not the only situation in which something is created with one intention and is then used with skill to complete a different set of functions. It is really interesting to see work from people who think outside of the box like this.
This is mind blowing. I used to hate excel, with passion. Once I became a manager in CMU, Excell is all I use, for everything. It is very odd for me nowadays to make a piece of paperwork in anything else but Excell. However, this is a whole other level! This is taking day to day technology and make it something else. I love it. It comes to show that what we know and what we are “proficient” in, is challenged every day. The world of technology is ever changing, and the fact that each user can tailor it to their interests is amazing. Coding shapes and makes everything work, I feel like learning to code is a super power, I say this every day in PDM. Now I’m afraid to say I can use excel. Can I make a budget spreadsheet with pivot tables, yes. Can I make excell drum on its own. Hell no.
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