While Norway won the most medals, Liechtenstein did the best per capita. The bar chart shows medals by type, population and medals per capita for each medal winning country at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
The tiny country of Liechtenstein with only 37,340 people won one medal. This equated to 26 medals for every million inhabitants. Norway with 39 medals and as population of 5 million had 7 medals for every million people. All other countries had less than 2 medals for every million inhabitants. Among the top five medal winners, Norway led and was followed by Netherlands, Canada, Germany and the US in per capita medals won. Even though China won 9 medals, it trailed all other medal winners with .01 medals per million inhabitants.
Bar Chart with Data Columns
How I Created The Bar Chart
Bloomberg provided the data in a table that I pasted into Excel. The table had rows for each country and columns for number of gold, silver and bronze medals, population, GDP, medals per capita and medals per $100B GDP. I thought that per capita medals was a more understandable number to our audience. The interesting story in the data was Liechtenstein's performance relative to its size. Norway also stood out in both total medals and medals per capita.
Here are the steps to create the chart:
- organize data in the spreadsheet by copying and pasting from the table created in Excel from the Bloomberg data
- create a horizontal bar chart
- show gold, silver and bronze medal count, total medals and population in millions as data columns on the right of the chart
- adjust margins so that the y axis is moved the right
- move all bar labels left, leaving space for the data to go between the bar labels and the y axis
- select all the data columns and move them to appear between the bar labels and the y axis
- use the 'black circle' special character as the header for the gold, silver and bronze medal columns
- change the colors of each black circle to gold, silver and bronze (colors found on the web)
- adjust font sizes for all labels to be the same size, except black circle labels (the character is small so use a bigger font size to compensate)
- bold the labels for the five biggest medal winners.
Take This Chart and Make It Your Own
Download this chart and edit it using Mekko Graphics. To learn more about bar charts, see these examples in our Chart Gallery
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