One race, Every medalist ever – Interactive Excel Visualization

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.