Heat maps are pretty versatile. They have been used for everything ranging from charting home prices to changes in the stock market.
Inspired by the last ball win over the South Africans yesterday night, I wondered if some of that action could be captured in a graph. One of the interesting approaches that came to mind was a heat map. But before we go further, here’s how a normal scorecard would look like at the end of the match.
As you can see, this is clear and concise and probably the best thing to use if one were interested in knowing who scored how much and how well the bowlers bowled. But this does not give you quite the feel of how the match went ball by ball. While it does tell you that the match went down to the wire, it does let the user form an idea of what caused it to go went that way.
So here’s what a cricketing heat map would look like.
For how this was done:
Tabulate the Match Data
Data above all else !!! So here goes the data into a spreadsheet.
Creating the Data Table
Read the data from the tabulation sheet and lay out the grid on which the heatmap can be superimposed. We would need to use a few excel formulas out here.
Using Conditional Formatting for Creating a Heat Map
While conditional formatting was limited to 3 conditions in Excel 2003 & earlier, Excel 2007 onwards that got changed. So we can have separate color coding for each category on run scored (0 to 6).
Once we have these steps done, we would need to resize the rows, extend the conditional formatting to all the cells and add a color legend.