
Gif2xlsx – Convert GIFs to Excel files - lindauer
https://github.com/pugwonk/gif2xlsx/blob/master/README.md
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cosmie
> 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.

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userbinator
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.

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chatmasta
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.

~~~
stfwn
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/](https://forums.swift.org/t/we-
need-filename/)

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HocusLocus
> 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.

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superasn
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 :)

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cm2187
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.

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melse
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.

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lnyng
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.

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tsukurimashou
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.

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m0zg
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.

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jiveturkey
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBX2QQHlQ_I)

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ColinWright
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.

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tbbttbbt
> 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](http://justpic.info/images4/1100/usage_king.png)

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garyclarke27
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!

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SmellyGeekBoy
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.

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

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userbinator
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](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021)

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

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pbhjpbhj
Surely IM does this already. /s

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waltbosz
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.

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mooncake
>Has computer science gone too far?

