Celebrating India’s Worldcup Cricket Victory – In Excel Dashboard Style!

I know I am late to the party, but better late than…, uh! forget it.

As the keen readers of our blog knew, I like cricket and I show my enthusiasm by making an excel dashboard (or infographic) whenever Indian team reaches a major milestone. So naturally, I was super excited when we won the ICC Worldcup 2011. Last time Indian won the event was in 1983 and my idea of a dashboard at that time was a bottle of milk and jingo-bell, my favorite shake-to-make-annoying-noise toy. I think our latest world-cup victory deserves something more than that. So here we go.

Excel Dashboard to Celebrate India’s World-cup Victory (2011)

(Click here to see larger version)

How is this Dashboard constructed?

This dashboard was one of the most difficult ones I built, because I did not know what to put in the dashboard. I know that the dashboard should reflect our team’s hardwork, journey, outstanding performances but I had no clue which format & layout exposed these qualities. So I took a lot of time drawing up sketches of possible dashboards before hitting on the present layout. Once I came-up with the layout, the actual dashboard took me about 4 hours to make (and may be another 4 for polish).

Here are some of the techniques used in the dashboard:

• The dashboard is divided in to 3 areas – Highlights, our journey to the victory and best performances.
• Highlights: This section shows overall summary of all the 9 matches India have played. It shows some interesting statistics, how much our top players contributed to our victory etc.
  Techniques used: All parts of this are made with text boxes and simple text formulas.
• Our Journey to victory: This was the most time consuming & intense part of the dashboard as I made this portion interactive. The left side shows all the matches we have played by date and the results. When you select a particular match, the right side portion shows a match summary. This includes match venue, result, toss details, India’s top 3 batsmen, top 3 bowlers, photos of India’s best batting & bowling performers, oppositions score, best batsman, bowler, their stats. It also shows the country flags etc.
  Techniques used: The click to select as described in on-demand charts article, conditional formatting, picture links, more picture links, LARGE formula.
  The most difficult part of this was to get a moving arrow that would change its position based on which match is selected. I did this with picture links, offset formula and a dynamic named range. (Examine the named range movingArrow).
• Best performances (top 10): In this area, I showed the best batting, bowling, catching, partnership performances for all the matches in World-cup (not just India’s matches).
  Techniques used: All the charts are made in Excel 2010 using solid bar conditional formatting & picture link based techniques. Later, I just copied them and pasted as images so that they look same in Excel 2007 also.

Colors & Fonts:

• I choose the blue color as it is team India’s jersey color. I used orange to contrast the best performances.
• The fonts are Bookman Old Style & Meriyo UI.

Download the Cricket World-cup Dashboard Excel file:

Click here to download the locked workbook. [mirror]

Why lock it? I am giving away unlocked version of this workbook + a 36 minute lesson to all the customers who buy Excel Dashboard Tutorial or Excel School Dashboards.  So if you want an unlocked copy of this, go ahead and get either of them. (If you have previously bought one of these products, you will receive an email with instructions on downloading your bonus.)

Credits:

All the data for the dashboard came from espncricinfo.com.

Special thanks to Ravindra, my assistant, for compiling the data.

How do you like the Dashboard?

I was afraid whether I can do justice to our team’s glorious world-cup victory in a dashboard. So I kept on delaying this. But in the end, I am happy with the dashboard. It tells the story of our team’s journey and highlights best performers.

What do you think? Did you like this dashboard? How would you have designed it?

As an aside, Many of our readers know only about cricket that chirps. So I want to ask, did this dashboard make any sense to you?

Other Awesome Resources on Excel Dashboards:

• Excel Info-graphic Poster to Celebrate Sachin’s 200 runs
• Excel Dashboard with 10007 comments data
• Excel Dashboard to prove that Hui is awesome
• More on Excel Dashboards
• Want to make dashboards using Excel – Join Excel School.