export excel charts for animated gif

[Guest]

Hi. I want to make an animation from excel charts. I have already written a
Visual Basic program that saves the charts as static gif files. I don't know
much about animation, but when I tried to create a short video using a gif
animation program, the file size was big because I didn't know a smart way to
tell the animation program that the excel files were mostly similar from one
image to the next.

Is there a particular gif animation program that works well with charts
exported from Excel (for example, reading the different parts of the excel
chart as separate "objects" for animation)?

Thanks,

Parke

 

[Del Cotter]

Hi. I want to make an animation from excel charts. I have already written a
Visual Basic program that saves the charts as static gif files. I don't know
much about animation, but when I tried to create a short video using a gif
animation program, the file size was big because I didn't know a smart way to
tell the animation program that the excel files were mostly similar from one
image to the next.

Is there a particular gif animation program that works well with charts
exported from Excel (for example, reading the different parts of the excel
chart as separate "objects" for animation)?

Have you considered saving the static parts, such as axes and grids,
with no data as one static gif, then saving the changing parts as
minimal Excel charts with no axes or grids? Then create an animated gif
with transparency (I don't know if this part is possible) and finally
presenting the animation in HTML on top of the static backdrop.

Alternatively, could you find some MPEG tools, which surely have the
redundancy compression problem licked?

Finally, if you can't do any of that, look at your graphs to see if
there is any fluff you could stand to lose completely, like big colored
bars and heavy grids.

 

[Holger Gerths]

You can use Photoshop for example.
Copy each single picture from excel to Photoshop.
To copy, use Excel-Menu Shift-Edit, then you see "Copy Picture".
Copy cells behind a chart, not the chart. Make charts transparent.
Paste each single picture in a new PS-layer. Sort them vice versa.
Save as gif. Pictures are played one after the other.

Greetings,
Holger.