The Playfair Charts: Trade-balance Time-series

In one of his blogs excelcharts.com, Jorge Camoes talks about recreating the iconic "Playfair" charts. William Playfair (read more about him here), universally heralded as the "founder of the graphical method of statistics" is credited with inventing four types of diagrams. The Line graph and Bar chart in 1786, and the Pie chart and the Circle graph in 1801.

In his post, Excel charts meet William Playfair, Jorge includes pictures of the original Playfair England export and the prices of wheat and weekly wages charts alongside his recreated versions. He also lays down some rules for this challenge. "A single chart (no overlapping charts), no shapes/clipart to display data and, obviously, no Photoshop."

The original Playfair trade-balance time-series chart from Wikipedia,

and in below, my recreated version in Excel.

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