Animate In Excel 2
In the last post I showed you a macro that would animate in Excel. In this post I will show you another way I animate in Excel.
It is a bit less technical than the last and uses the RANDBETWEEN function to change a chart and conditional formatting to change some colors.
This is a relatively simple animation, but one that I hope will give you ideas to use yourself.
This was done entirely in Excel and without macros, but you can apply macros if you wanted.
Create A Character To Animate
The robot I created was based on old school computer game characters.
I used the fill colors to color cells. The image below is a close up of some of these cells.
I set the column width to be 0.5 and row height to be 3.75. When I zoom out, the character looks like this.
Note the different shades being used and for now, i left the mouth area blank.
Set Up The Mouth
The mouth animation is a chart based on random numbers that gets updated.
Set up a table similar to this using the RANDBETWEEN function on a sheet separate to your character.
There are 2 numbers between the brackets of the RANDBETWEEN function.
The result of this function will give a random number between 1000 and 5000. Try this function yourself, click on a blank cell and repeatedly press the delete button, you will see the numbers change as Excel refreshes.
The number of columns or rows in this table are up to your personal preference, depending on how small or how many colors you want in your ‘mouth’.
Now create a 100% stacked column based on this table and change the data series fill colors and line colors and weight until you are happy with them.
Move, resize and place this chart over the mouth of your character.
On the sheet with your character, select a blank cell and repeatedly press the delete button on your keyboard.
You should see the mouth change now as the random numbers change and update the chart that makes up the mouth.
You can change the size of the colors in each column of your mouth by changing the second value in your RANDBETWEEN functions.
By playing around with these, you will see how the changes look and find the ‘mouth’ you are happy with.
More Ideas To Animate In Excel
In the original robot that I first animated, a long long time ago, I used conditional formatting combined with RANDBETWEEN to change the color of the character’s antenna and change the color of the eyes to make it look like it is blinking.
Rather than going through how to do this, I think it might be more beneficial to you to work this out yourself, it may generate more ideas for you.
The first character I animated was similar to a fairly well known plumber who runs and jumps quite a bit and who for various reasons I cannot replicate here ;).
Have fun with trying to animate in Excel, it probably won’t win you any Oscar nominations but it can be a fun way to pass some time.
