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Excel Visualization of Olympic Medal Count

In keeping with the spirit of the 2008 Summer Olympics, I’ve been posting some data visualizations and dashboards related to the Beijing Games. On Dashboards by Example we saw the Olympics Dashboard done in Adobe Flex by iDashboards and, on The Dashboard Spy, we saw the New York Times Olympic Medal Count Infographic.

As a reminder, let’s gawk again at the NY Times work of art. You can view the flash-based graphic at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html .

You’ll have to visit the actual infographic to have it work, but once you get there just follow these instructions:

Circles are sized by the number of medals that countries won in summer Olympic Games. Use the slider to view past Olympics, or click on a country to display a list of its medal winners.

2008 Olympic Medal Map New York Times Infographic

The point of today’s post, however, is to laud the work of a Microsoft Excel enthusiast in this area. Chandoo, editor of the hilariously-named PointyHairedDilbert:Excel Tips, Technology Tidbits & Business Insights, has created the following Excel-based version of the New York Times Olympic Medal bubble chart:

Excel-based Bubble Chart for 2008 Olympic Medal Count by Chandoo

Isn’t that great? Moreover, Chandoo details how he created this in Excel:

In his post titled, Doing the NY Times Olympic Medals by Country & Year Visualization in Excel, Chandoo offers the Olympic Medals Bubble Chart Excel Worksheet as a download.

Great work, Chandoo! I’ve just added you and your Excel blog as an expert resource. See The Dashboard Spy’s Big List of Experts.

Have a look at his great post. Here’s a snippet of what you’ll find. Also, in the comments, you’ll find Dashboard Spy reader and Excel Visualization Ace, Jon Peltier explaining a technique to change the color of the bubbles based on the country it belongs to.

Update: Based on contributions by his readers, Chandoo has posted additional excel files for us to play with. See his second post titled The Olympic Medals by Country Chart - Now Improved. There is the version by Jon Peltier and the alternate approach by Robert from Germany as shown in this screenshot.

Note: Use the links in the paragraph above for the downloads, not the ones in the following image as they will not work.

Alternate approaches to visualizing the olympic medal count data

Tags: Olympic Medal Data Visualization, Excel Dashboards, Excel data visualization

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What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.  

2 Responses to “Excel Visualization of Olympic Medal Count”

  1. Chandoo Said on August 13th, 2008 at 10:11 am quote

    Hi there,

    Thanks for taking time to comment about this, I am thrilled to be featured on the dashboard spy’s big list.

    I like the dashboards you are covering here, adding this to my reading list.

  2. james Said on August 22nd, 2008 at 6:41 am quote

    Very nice widgets.
    I love the interactive aspect of them. Also the visualization of any increase or decrease in performance for any given year is astonishing and very user friendly.

    I have found a nice widget that visualizes the medal tally from different perspectives:
    1: medal count per million dollar GDP
    2: medal count per million inhabitants

    In addition this widget can display the result for both total medal count and gold medal count.

    I hope you will find it useful:-)
    http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/48abc6bc903b61d0

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Last Modified: Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 @ 15:11

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