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.
11 Responses to “Use Alt+Enter to get multiple lines in a cell [spreadcheats]”
@Chandoo:
One more useful trick.......
In a column you have no. of data in rows and need to copy in the next row from the previous row, no need to go for the previous rows but entering Alt + down arrow, you will get the list of data, (in asending order), entered in the previous rows...
This is another great tip. I use this all the time to make sense of some *very* long formulas. As soon as the formula is debugged I remove the break.
Great tip Chandoo!
I use this feature often and it has even gotten the, "how did you do that" response.
Thanks!
@Ketan: Alt+down arrow is an awesome tip. I never knew it and now I am using it everyday.
@Jorge, Tony: Agree... 🙂
[...] Day 1: Insert Line Breaks in a Cell [...]
how can we merge a two sheet.
excellent idea. Chandoo you are genious
Hi chandoo,
I have used ctrl+enter to break the cell. But I did not get the result.
Please tell me how can i break the cell in multiple lines.
Hi, Ranveer,
Its not Ctrl+enter to break the cell, use Alt+Enter to make it happen.
hi Chandoo....
how we can use Alt+Enter in multiple rows at the same time please reply hurry i have lot of work and have no time and i m stuck in this. 🙁
Alt+J worked once 🙁
So I found another more reliable way:
=SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),"")
Where A2 is the cell that contains the line breaks which the code for it is CHAR(13). It will replace it with whatever inside the ""