During London 2012 Olympics, Usain Bolt reached the 100mts finish line faster than anyone in just 9.63 seconds. Most of us would be still reading this paragraph before Mr. Bolt finished the race.
To put this in perspective, NY Times created a highly entertaining interactive visualization. Go ahead and check it out. I am sure you will love it.
So I wanted to create something similar in Excel. And here is what I came up with.
Demo of Usain Bolt vs. Rest Visualization
Here is a quick demo of this interactive chart. Click on it to enlarge.
How is this made?
One thing is sure, It took me more than 9.63 seconds to create this 😉
The basic ingredients of this chart are Interactive Hyperlinks, Conditional formatting, Form Controls, INDEX + MATCH formulas, Picture links and Tables.
Since explaining all this is going to take forever, I made a short video showing you behind curtains of this. Watch it below [or click here to watch it on YouTube]
Download this Interactive Excel Workbook
Click here to download the workbook and play with it.
Note: This works in Excel 2010 or above only.
Do you like this visualization
I loved re-constructing this NY Times chart. It was a nice challenge. Although so many hyperlinks made Excel a bit sluggish, it was worth it.
What about you? Do you like this? Go ahead and break apart the download file and see what more you can do.
Special thanks to NYTimes for the inspiration.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good