Live Labs Pivot is a great tool to publish large amounts of data in a compelling way. To showcase this new Microsoft Technology Wortell has created an example of a Live Labs Pivot table for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The video below shows how this pivot works. Do you want to play with it yourself? Download Live Labs Pivot here and then open the collection, but putting the following link in the address bar of Pivot: http://media.wortell.nl/pivot/wk/wk2010.cxml

And here are some screenshots:

When a specific flag is clicked details about the country are shown.

How we did it…

Basically a Pivot can be created programmatically or by using Excel. Excel can be used in situations where the data can be easily copied of filled in by hand. If there is data coming from multiple systems, backend or environments or if you are handling a large amount of data we recommend creating the XML schema programmatically.

First of all we selected the sources of the data. We used Wikipedia for the schedule of plays and the FIFA website for the descriptions of the individual teams. We then put all this data into a Pivot Collections Excel sheet. You can read the description of this Excel sheet on the Microsoft site where the plugin can also be downloaded. Once all the data was put into the Excel sheet we simply Published the collection from the Excel plugin and the Live Labs Pivot was finished.