Skip navigation

Tag Archives: totally true stories

Excel spreadsheet artists

Did you know there was such a thing?  I didn’t until recently.  And in case you’re thinking of some guy stuck in a cube making exceptionally nice looking graphs, let me dispel this preconceived notion of yours.  This is what’s coming from Excel spreadsheet artists.

Links to source

Links to source

Isn’t that nice?  You’d never guess that was made via Excel.

The artist of that…painting? is Tatsuo Horiuchi.  He’s a 73 year old retiree.  I guess he wanted a hobby for when he retired, so he went out and bought himself a computer and taught himself Excel.  He was inspired by seeing the graphs businessmen would produce in Excel.  He had not previously used Excel.  At all.

Guys, this is really amazing.  A grandfatherly retiree decided to pick up Excel, having never used it before, and draw really beautiful…paintings? with Excel.  EXCEL.

Dude.  It’s Excel.  The most boring of the MS Office suite.  Ok, it might not be the most boring.  Access isn’t really that exciting.  Or…any of the rest of the MS Office suite.  They weren’t really meant to be exciting programs really.

But guys.  He’s painting with Excel!

You can see more of his stuff if you click on that picture of cherry blossoms.  It links to the article, which shows more of his artwork and even links to some of the Excel files so you play around with it yourself.

 

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

That is a real German word.  Or at least, it was.  It was recently dropped from the German language.

You might wonder as to how the German language even acquired such a word.  Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz literally means “cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law.”  As you might guess, it’s the name of an actual law.  They acquired the word when they passed the law, which was related to the mad cow disease outbreak in Europe awhile back.  The reason why the word has been dropped from the language is because that particular piece of legislation is now defunct.  No law, no word.

Of course, you might now wonder as to why the law would be such a long word to begin with.  The reason behind that is because the German language has this peculiarity in which you are allowed to mash several words together to form a new noun similar to tatpurusa.  So, the law describing the delegating duties of cattle marking and beef labeling supervision would be known as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.  If you perhaps wanted to talk about the beef labeling monitoring assessment assignment draft law debating club state of discussion reportage payment application form, you would refer to the rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetzesentw-urfsdebattierklubdiskussionsstandsberichterstattungsgeldantragsformular.

That last word isn’t real.  Apparently the Society for the German Language invented it for fun.  You might think that’s a really strange form of entertainment.  Well, it’s not.  I’ve done it before too, trying to describe a really horrible, made-up disease.  Of course, when you do that, you aren’t mashing whole words together to form a new word.  You’re only mashing root prefixes and/or suffixes.  But it’s pretty similar.  And it can be fun.  So there.  THERE!

Anyway, in case you were ever curious as to why you keep encountering these gigantic words when you’re out and about in Germany, now you know.

Oh, and if you ever thought twitter hashtags were hard to read, I guess you should look into studying German.