Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents

CyberKnet writes "Some enterprising folks over at Google have collaborated via Google Documents to create holiday art using cells in a spreadsheet as the pixels. A time delay video was taken and is available over at YouTube and the result is pretty spectacular. More info on how they did this is available behind the scenes. They're inviting people to share their own masterpieces or post a video response over on YouTube."

Excel can do even more!

3d Graphics engine in Excel previously on slashdot:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/06/1732220&from=rss [slashdot.org]

Anime in Excel

Speaking of Excel, I came across a bunch of clips the other day on NicoNico Douga [nicovideo.jp] where they used Excel to draw video. Here are some YouTube mirrors of those videos, since the original site is Japanese and registration-only:
ToraDora! OP in Excel [youtube.com]
Higurashi Kai OP in Excel [youtube.com]

Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents

Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents

Jesus christ, so much for "do no evil"!

Re:Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents

Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents

Jesus christ, so much for "do no evil"!

I believe He was executed as well. I don't know if we can blame Google for it.

Re:

I believe He was executed as well. I don't know if we can blame Google for it.

Kinda like this [google.com]?

Re:Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents

You are thinking of Easter - this is Christmas!

Awesome

This is the sort of coolness that I like about technology - the fact that you can use to create something not quite mainstream, yet very interesting and very cool.

And these are the moments when I really enjoy reading Slashdot. Reminds me of how back in the day, Slashdot used to post something small but interesting done by a geek in a garage...

Except... this is clearly a PR piece

Your comment about "small but interesting done by a geek in a garage" is clearly not true. This was posted by Google PR, an $83bn outfit. That's one heck of a garage.

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Well, he didn't say it was a small garage.

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For one, I said it reminded me of those days, not that it was the same as those days.. For another, this was done by a few people at Google, which doesn't necessarily mean that the entire muscle of Google was behind them.

Well, he didn't say it was a small garage.

Amen.

Nice, however...

what would be really nice is doing this sort of "drawing in a spreadsheet" thing with a bunch of formulas. Fractals or something.

Re:Nice, however...

Huh, yeah. Let's have some boobs instead. Oh, God, I foresee a wave of Spread-em-sheet porn...

Re:Nice, however...

Huh, yeah. Let's have some boobs instead. Oh, God, I foresee a wave of Spread-em-sheet porn...

Okay, not exactly porn, but you inspired me to produce a nude... [google.com]

Idle?

Wow. A grid-based system capable of colouring grids can be used to do pixel art? Clearly the term "enterprising" has changed in meaning, but leaving that aside I have to ask why this is in tech? It quite clearly belongs in idle.

How fitting ...

Using a spreadsheet as a graphics program is about as efficient as using a browser to run office applications ...

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Yes, because it's so much more efficient for everyone to be using different versions of the software AND the document, unless you want to also deal with setting up a collaborative document system.

But opening a browser window and clicking a link - that's just too much effort.

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That - and it adds a whole layer of instability on top of your OS (browsers/JS need to be stable too).

All those lemmings who advocate running applications inside a browser (completely ignoring the fact that networking is available outside browsers too and you don't even need to hand over all your data to a 3rd party for groupware applications) should go apologize to Microsoft, who took a lot of flak for considering the browser part of the OS ...

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graphic guestbooks for the web are about 13 years old ... they actually work better for this type of "fun".

[Offtopic] Why is this in tech?

Not that I dislike the story - I just think it should be in Idle, not in Tech.

*yawn*

ASCII porn is *so* 1970's.

Heard round the net:

Spreadsheets or GTFO!

CAD by Excel

A few years ago, a newly hired engineer at work complained that he couldn't find any drawings done by the previous engineer that had just quit. I looked and the guy that quit had several thousand Excel files and his drawings were all done using tiny cells and cell borders. They were complex drawings of mechanical parts and some were even done in 3D perspective.

The new engineer ended up spending the next few months recreating all the drawings from A3-sized printouts using a real CAD program.

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They each had a different color that they were drawing; seems pretty logical to me. And I certainly can't blame Google for showing off their collaborative features. I've never seen multiple people able to work on the same doc/spreadsheet at once.. the different color cursors is a brilliant idea.

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the music in that youtube video has been very definitely ripped off of some other song I've heard, but I can't seem to put my finger on it. anyone else have an idea?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by ripped off but the comments section of the video in question mentioned that Google Programmer had created the song.

Re:

Yeah, but this was 5 people collaborating over the internet. I don't think you were doing that on your speccy 20 years ago. They were good, but not that good!