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Suba Vasudevan
Bored of poring over long Excel sheets for even longer hours? Here's how you can transport yourself to an awesome 3-D world... in Excel itself.
Open a new Excel 97 worksheet, then press F5. In the resulting dialog box type "X97:L97" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Now press the Tab key. Hold down Ctrl+Shift and click on the Chart Wizard toolbar button. And you will enter a world with awesome 3-D effects. You can navigate with the mouse, using the left button to move forward and the right button to move backwards.
Welcome to the world of Easter Eggs.
In cyber terminology, Easter Eggs are not made of chocolate and marzipan. Instead they are tiny pieces of code inserted into an application or hidden in your operating systems, games, browsers and other programs. Make the right moves and clicks, and you have entertaining pop-ups, scrolling lists of credits, a game you could play, or just naughty pranks happening to your computer.
What started as a hidden way to present a list of credits (the programmers deserve it too) has turned into a major pastime on countless desktops.
Easter Eggs are fun. For programmers, inserting the egg is the fun part; for users, it's the process of discovery. Says Andy B, a 21-year-old coding whizkid from Mumbai, "I love inserting Easter Eggs. Imagine having an undocumented piece of code that probably will surprise even your employer. Only you know every user-angle of what you've created. Not even the user... until the egg is discovered of course! The biggest kick is to let the Egg be there - then let people discover it, even if after many years. So it's better to make simpler eggs. Of course you don't get into such experimentations when you have strict deadlines on your head!"
The Internet, however, has taken the element of serendipity out of discovering Easter Eggs. With just a few clicks, you could learn about hundreds of already-discovered or creator-revealed Easter Eggs.
CNET for example, helps you with your egg-hunt. The site lists 24 of the really popular and fun Easter Eggs in categories like Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, Office 97, Office 95, Mozilla's Word, etc.
But two of the biggest sites on the Net for Easter Eggs are Egg Heaven and Eeggs. At Egg Heaven you will find a mind-boggling list of categories covering eggs in wide range of programs and applications. Eeggs competes with Egg Heaven in terms of the sheer number listed. You can browse categorties like Archive Computers, Software, Hardware, Electronics, Movies, Gaming and more. In fact, the popular game, Half Life itself has close to 15 Easter Eggs.
Did you know that even DVDs can have Easter Eggs? Well, try DVDangle. The site lists DVDs of films (ranging from 'Austin Powers' and 'Aliens' to 'Bedazzled', 'Charlie's Angels' and 'Sixth Sense'), which have eggs hidden in them.
If you are a techie, a visit to Newton Easter Eggs might just be what the doctor ordered.
Word Info explains what Easter Eggs are and gives instructions on how to find Easter Eggs in various versions of Word. The site also has information on Easter Eggs in applications like Outlook Express, Powerpoint, Excel and the like.
There are many more sites. Like EggCentral, a repository of eggs across platforms and applications; Mac OS eggs; eggs for Palm users; and, a personal favourite PinBall Wizard, a classic collection of easter eggs for all sorts of pinball games.
Enjoy!
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