Gif2xlsx – Convert GIFs to Excel files | Hacker News Reader

Gif2xlsx – Convert GIFs to Excel files

github.com

193 pointslindauer34 comments

> Why is your release binary built in debug mode?

> Be grateful for what you have.

I loved the FAQ overall. But something about this at the end made me bust out laughing.

It is pretty good

The README in general is inspired. It explains perfectly what it does and the issues it has while making it very clear that it was just a fun side project and does so with quite a bit of humour.

It’s a fresh break from those dry READMEs that talk as if their side project will revolutionise they way you use x.

No answer about why the sample picture isn't saved as a (static) gif though.

A gif of a gif in a excel spreadsheet? Are you mad?

This is a very good point. I've fixed it. https://github.com/pugwonk/gif2xlsx/commit/74867500ee9c43303...

Are you trolling? It's not an animated gif :)

A note for the privacy-conscious: binaries built in debug mode may contain more personally identifiable information, including full paths and names. Looking at his profile page, he does not seem too worried about concealing his identity, but it's just something to keep in mind if you want to release something (pseudo-)anonymously.

I wonder if there is an opportunity for a privacy cleaner for executables. Like there is for JPEGs.

strip(1)

strip(1) removes all debug info / symbols. But I was thinking of something that keeps the debug info but discards (or anonymizes) the personal info.

Indeed, this information often even makes it into the app store. You can sometimes decompile (or run strings on) an app and see a developer's home directory, for example.

There is a pitch on the Swift forum to encode only the file name in a binary instead of the entire path, or hash it. The OP there makes some points about file size, even.

https://forums.swift.org/t/we-need-filename/

> Because error handling is boring, and when my wife says "what have you been up to today" there needs to be more for me to say than "well, I wrote this converter".

I want to hire this guy. I need to build a company first.

Somebody recently asked a question on a forum that if you had $100m dollars would you still be coding? I think this project definitely answers the kind of coding I'd be doing :)

I’d say I would be coding more! Own projects I chose tend to be more interesting to me than some work someone else dumped on my desk.

I feel like this sums it up quite nicely:

> Also, let's be honest, if you've got time to convert GIFs to spreadsheets then you've sure got time to wait for it to finish.

This is actually exactly 1 year ago, and the guy spent two days finishing the project, very well done!

BTW I was assuming that the program can somehow produce animating Excel file from gifs. It will be cool if it works that way.

I wonder if you could do that with macros.

From the readme:

>Animated GIFs are converted on a one-frame-per-worksheet basis, so you have to step through the worksheets to animate them. I was originally intending using conditional formatting and iterative calc to display these, but unfortunately the Excel team* seem to have single-threaded the calculation of conditional formatting and it was far too slow to render.

* I used to work on the Excel team so one could argue that this is partly my fault.

This aspect of many Microsoft products is pretty under-appreciated. Many of them are immensely programmable from the outside, and expose pretty decent object models on top of which to write programs. First money I ever made with my coding was writing VBA in MS Access for some warehouse which wanted to keep track of tens of thousands of different train parts. It was so easy I couldn't believe how much I got paid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I

That's a fabulous clip - I was in one of the shows where Matt did this routine, and live, it's utterly brilliant.

And the one joke is superb.

I was about to post this. Matt Parker has done incredible things

That's rather good, I hadn't actually seen it before I made this!

> Usage:

> gif2xlsx myfile.gif

> Output will be saved as out.xlsx in current folder. If there is any output. If not you can have a full refund.

Yep definetly my kind of dev guy.

I also do stuff like that, sometimes I take it further

like in the help description: http://justpic.info/images4/1100/usage_king.png

Cute, Confirms my experience though. Conditional Formatting in Excel is a nightmare, they got me excited at first, but I wasted so much time and got so frustrated with them - I gave up and have never used them since. As the article says performance is abysmal in large spreadsheets, also they do not play well with Excel tables, (which I use a lot) you end up with thousands of CF formulas in tables, they keep breeding and mutating and you cant stop them!

Oddly enough I started on a new (boring, work related) project with the OpenXML SDK just yesterday. From what I've seen so far it's really nice.

Imagine taking a screenshot of Excel that has opened one of the generated spreadsheets... And then converting it again!

Someone in the demoscene used Excel a while ago to similar effect, although I suspect that wasn't automatically generated: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021

So... a pull-request to merge a feature branch into ImageMagick is coming soon? :)

Surely IM does this already. /s

Great fun. This reminds me of a program I wrote in the days of AIM to convert an image to HTML so you could put a picture in your AIM profile.

>Has computer science gone too far?

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