Here is my attempt at using Data Explorer in Excel. I used it to extract Sachin Tendulkar’s runs by ground/location from ESPNCricinfo’s excellent Statsguru feature.

It was such a breeze to bring up the stats, get the URL, import it into Excel via Data Explorer and get running right away.

Then came the complications - there are some grounds like The Oval which are not really cities or locations. Also, there are some places like Surrey that default to US cities with the same name.

With some help from Dan English (@denglishbi) I was able to clean it up by concatenating the opposition name to the ground to at least get the country right.

The next issue was that since I was using the opposition name to derive the country, and since ESPNCricinfo does not distinguish between home and away, or include that as a column, all the matches showed up as “v “. So I had to run two queries on Statsguru: one for home where I then hard-coded “, India” and another for away where I added “, " and .

Then I used “append” in Data Explorer to merge the two data sets and then threw in a Power View Map on top of that data.

Sorry, the sexier part of this experiment, the Power View report is not visible on Excel Web App, so you will have to download it. :-(

Overall, I came away quite excited and pleased with Data Explorer and how easy it is for business users to build compelling analytics. Find more info at the Data Explorer for Excel blog.

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