Excel Optical Illusions Week #27

As promised last week, the Smith Chart will be published in a few hours. It is one of the most demanding charts I have ever created, and it is just about ready. Please look for it Monday.

In the meantime, this week's Excel Optical Illusion is called Swimming Fish, and was originally created by Emily Knight and Arthur Shapiro. It was a 2007 Finalist in the Best Illusion of the Year Contest hosted by the Vision Sciences Society.

Are the fish bobbing up and down? I can assure you that they do not move.

My Excel version of this illusion is much smoother than the animated GIF above can reproduce. It includes an option to remove the moving background, which eliminates the illusion.

This is an XY Scatter chart with a little VBA for the animation. Pretty straightforward but I like how the background lines were made to seem infinite when there are only six of them in actual fact.

Here is the file.

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Why do I share these optical illusions? The techniques that are used to make them, when mastered, can be used in many other Excel projects, in charting, formula crafting, and formatting. Learn them. They will aid you on your journey to become an Excel Hero.

Here is a list of other Excel Optical Illusions here at Excel Hero:

- Bulging Checkerboard

- Egg Shadow

- Intersection Dots

- Fraser's Spiral

- Pastel Waves

- Ambiguous Cube

- Eye Jitter

- Eye Jitter 2

- Hering Illusion

- Shaded Diamonds

- Stereokinetic Illusion

- Snake Illusion

- Swirling Almonds

- Lilac Chaser

- Counter-Intuitive Illusory Contours

- Swirling Almonds 2

- Breathing Square

- Enigma

- Two Tributes to M.C. Escher

- Two Sinusoids

- Perpetual Collisions

- Freezing Rotation

- Reverse Spoke Illusion

- Swimming Fish

And here's a list of other animated charts on Excel Hero:

 - Animated Business Chart

 - Animated Business Chart #2

 - celtic muse

 - solarsong

 - HTML 5 Readiness

 - Real-time Advanced Excel Chart

 - Excel Location Mapping

 - Animated Stacked Chart

 - Excel, A Presentation Platform (Number Spiral)

 - Eurovision 2009

 - Monte Carlo PI

 - Excel Chess Game Viewer

 - Excel NFL Drive Chart

 - LED RSS News Ticker

 - Lilac Chaser (Optical Illusion)

 - Stereokinetic (Optical Illusion)

 - Illusory Contours (Optical Illusion)

 - Breathing Square (Optical Illusion)

 - Enigma (Optical Illusion)

 - Two Sinusoids (Optical Illusion)

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