Murphy Mac

Admittedly, Murphy is a little hung up on Excel this week. This is probably the end. But if you’ve never looked at a pivot table it’s worth taking a peek.

We’re going to use the same data we used yesterday, an accounting of Murphy’s gambling activity while in Vegas last week. The raw data doesn’t tell us much, but the pivot table gives us tons of presentation options.

There are some truly nifty features in a pivot table. Like double-clicking a sum to create a table displaying its source data. The interface is great too - friendly drag and drop. Even if your table set-up isn’t right you can probably drag a few things here and there to fix it.

You can base a pivot table on an Excel list or some other data source. In the screencast we’ll use an Excel list for simplicity.

The chips were flying last week while Murphy vacationed in Las Vegas. He kept a log detailing all his gaming sessions and entered all the data into Excel. The Subtotals feature made it really easy to summarize where the money went.

A lot of Excel’s features for data management rely on what’s called “a list.” You can make certain tasks much easier by helping Excel recognize the boundaries of your list. How do you do that? Enter your data without any completely blank rows or columns. Excel sees the last row or column before a blank as the list’s edge. You can also apply some simple formatting to your header row (the column labels) so Excel won’t treat that row as part of your data.

Excel also has a List Manager feature to make your list more user friendly. But Murphy’s a little old-school when it comes to Excel, so he doesn’t often explicitly tell the application he’s making a list. You might like some of the features in a List Manager list, like a row at the bottom for adding more data.

Lots of people use Excel as a database. But with too much data it can become unwieldy. If you were to inadvertently highlight nine of your ten columns and then sort - that would be bad. The last column wouldn’t get sorted. Your data would be scrambled and you might not realize it for a while.

If you have data that truly requires a database it shouldn’t be stored in Excel. There are plenty of dedicated database applications to choose from. And Excel can still access your data in other programs to help with reporting.

Murphy looked at other Excel data features a few months ago. Take a look at this post to learn more about filtering your Excel data. Come back tomorrow for a look at Pivot Tables.

Just a quick post from the road - wanted to make sure everyone knew that Amazon is having a big sale on Macbooks.

Also - if you haven’t checked out Macitt.com take a look. They’re giving away a Macbook! Post some of your favorite Murphy Mac entries up there - get us some publicity! If you haven’t been to Macitt yet you can think of it as an intimate Digg for Mac users.
Murphy is missing the screencasts - but we’ll be back in action next week! Now, back to my Baccarat….

NOTE:  The sale is over.

Murphy’s in Vegas this week - no screencasts. There’s plenty of other stuff to keep you occupied though. If you’re a switcher and you haven’t taken the time to get familiar with the Terminal maybe this is the week to do it. Start with the older posts in the Terminal category and work your way through.

Or visit some other sites. Murphy saw some great stuff with the Command key over on Silver Mac. And the guys at MacApper are always writing up tons of useful software. The Mac Lawyer proves there’s a Mac site for everyone with plenty of practical information.

More time to kill? And money? You could sign up for a Bluehost account. Better yet - buy yourself something on Amazon. You get a new toy - Murphy gets a cut! Either way you’ll be buying Murphy a little more time at the tables so he can get his room comped!

You can make a map just like the one in Raiders of the Lost Ark - if you’ve got Final Cut Express. It’s pretty easy, but it probably won’t look like something out of Industrial Light and Magic.

However - you could always reduce the opacity of your map and lay it over tracks of whatever your real video covers. The reduction in opacity will go a long way toward hiding any defects in your effect.

Murphy created his map file in Photoshop and drew a red line from a starting city to a destination city. The red line goes on its own layer. Then the two layers are exported as png files. Final Cut Express will accept the transparency of your red line file.

Put the red line file on a track above the map file in FCE. Then you can use key frames to have the line file start with one edge cropped out of view. Set another keyframe later on the time line bringing the edge back to its original position. Final Cut Express will slowly move the edge during playback, revealing your red line. Confused? Watch the screencast.

Most effects can’t be keyframed in Final Cut Express. Toys like that are reserved for Final Cut Pro. But the items on your motion tab can be keyframed, which facilitates some fun stuff. If you don’t have Final Cut Express check out the Amazon discount. If you qualify for academic pricing you can get it for even less.

Check out this screencast to see how to make fake twins using Final Cut Express.