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London 2012 medal tally in Excel

Some alternative views of the Olympic medal count and how to

 

Thanks to all the readers who dropped us a note about our article on the London 2012 Olympics calendar and how to overlay it in Outlook.  While many are using it to schedule their TV viewing, others use the calendar to work out how delayed their local TV’s ‘Live’ Olympic coverage is .

We don’t know whether to be pleased or feel neglected because the “Olympic Branding Police” haven’t contacted us .

The Guardian newspaper has the usual medals table but goes beyond that with some more creative approaches.  They have a comparison between various predictions and the current medal tally.

Even better they have alternative tables comparing medal counts against a countries population, GDP and team size.   At the time of writing Slovenia is 19th on the official medal ranking (1 Gold medal) but first when compared to population.

You can hop over to their spreadsheet to see all the data and calculations.  Use the tabs at the bottom of the worksheet to see the information in various forms. 

It’s posted in Google Docs but can be downloaded to Excel via File | Download so you can do your own analysis.

One alternative they haven’t done is a weighted ranking according to the type of medal.  The Olympic system uses a total medal count with each type (Gold, Silver, Bronze) each counting for one with gold medal count deciding the ranking.  An alternative would be to assign each medal a simple points score (Gold = 3, Silver = 2, Bronze = 1) then count up the points.  This would adjust for countries that get few gold but plenty of silver or bronze.

To date we’ve not been able to find a live clean feed of the medal tally that can be plugged into Excel.  You can try using Excel’s Data | from Web option to import from The Guardian’s worksheet but it doesn’t work very well. 

The Guardian has, understandably, disabled the ‘Publish to Web’ option that would make importing easier.

If you find a regularly updated and ‘clean’ feed of Olympic medal info, please let us know.

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