Somnath's Excel Charts

My last project involved using a multitude of regions for drawing analysis, parallels and comparison. Not wanting to use yet another Choropleth graph, I decided to look up alternatives that were easier to create and preferably required no VBA. Soon I stumbled upon "The Dorling Cartogram", defined in the UCSB site as, "This type of cartogram was named after its inventor, Danny Dorling of the University of Leeds. A Dorling cartogram maintains neither shape, topology nor object centroids, though it has proven to be a very effective cartogram method. To create a Dorling cartogram, instead of enlarging or shrinking the objects themselves, the cartographer will replace the objects with a uniform shape, usually a circle, of the appropriate size." I had the data for Obesity in the United States handy, so I decided to give it a try before using it in my project. I opted to use Bubble charts because data points within a series may need to be of varied shapes based on

I stumbled into this graph some years ago, while looking up data for a project on US Auto Sales, through a post in Neoformix - Discovering and Illustrating Patterns in Data. So, when I started making the list of Pie-Doughnut combination charts, I decided to include this variety and use it to display survivors and victims of the Titanic tragedy in its centenary year.  It is not a particularly difficult chart to create, especially if one sets up the table properly. My first attempt brought me this: I thought a lot over whether to keep the statistics as labels for the outermost doughnut that displayed the survivor/victim proportions. They get a bit muddled up around the first-class women and children's section and the inability to add leader lines to the doughnut labels meant they couldn't be dragged away and the lines used as pointers. Here is the chart with the stats on display:

Happy to be back after a pretty busy beginning to the new year. I had this completed almost immediately following the preceding post but was otherwise hard-pressed to find a suitable time to post it. Soon after writing the Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart post, I started searching for more varieties of charts that can be created using combinations of Pie-Doughnut charts. Soon enough, I found one through Naomi B. Robbins' comment in a Jorge Camoes' post . The referenced PDF article attempts to use Fan Plot to display relative quantities and differences using the R statistical language as is shown in the image below. Impassive of its benefits and/or disadvantages, I created it in Excel.

I was taken to the  Florence Nightingale's Wiki page   during a recent research, and one of the interesting things I noted was her contribution to statistics. It came to me as a pleasant surprise that she is credited with inventing the polar area diagram , or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Following the completion of my project and in my weekend to spare, I devoted time to recreating the chart in Excel. It took a combination of Doughnut-Pie-and XY charts and close to four hours to finish it. The colours are a bit darker, the values are approximate and the labels differently oriented, yet the chart looks fairly close to the original as is shown by the picture below.

Soon after finishing the second Playfair chart, the one on Wheat Price and Wages, I searched the internet for additional charts made by him. I found a Bar chart circa 1786, which showed the Scottish export and import volumes with other countries. For me, the real thrill was to scroll by the list of the name of places long consigned to history books - Jersey Is, Greenland, Prussia, Denmark and Norway (together) and Flanders.  First, the original Playfair Barchart from Wikipedia,  Then, my version of it in Excel.  A couple of parting words:  Excel 2007 no longer support dots and lines as fillers for charts. Hence, the ribbed import chart is given a different color, Gold.  Normally, I'd use data point labels to construct the chart legends and other declarations given at the bottom of the chart. However, given Excel 2007' inability to automatically re-size labels to fit texts, I was forced to use text-boxes instead. 

After successfully recreating the Playfair trade-balance time-series chart , I took up the second chart shown in Jorge's post which is fancifully titled, "Chart showing at one view the price of the quarter of wheat and Wages of Labour by the week from The year 1565 to 1821." I left out the top arches. Comparatively, this was the easier chart. Staying true to Jorge' rules, I didn't use any shape or clipart objects in this chart. The big oval shaped object in the middle of the chart, which contains the title is actually a marker for a data point. The original Playfair Wheat price and Wages chart from Wikipedia, and underneath, is my version in Excel.