The African Urban Agglomeration Chart

In the Guardian datablog of 23rd Nov, 2010, a report was published predicting the population of Africa's cities is to rise rapidly. I sat down to see how the historically established African metropolis will expand over time and whether any relatively smaller city or a yet unknown settlement will become the focal point of African settlement in the years to come.

The Guardian data can be viewed and downloaded from here. In my excel workbook, I've added additional columns to help me with the location of these cities, and to abbreviate their names as some, though exotic and wonderful, are too expansive to fit it my chart.

Every dataset can be analyzed and represented in several ways using tables, charts or a combination of them. Here the cities can either be represented singularly showing the increase/decrease in population over the years, or be compared against each other. I tried to be innovative and combine my two distinct thoughts into one masterful combination of table and chart.

Apparently, this had to be a dynamic table as well as a dynamic chart, since a static one just wouldn't suffice. Since the data is for 20 cities and five surveys between 2005-2025 at five-year intervals, I chose to include option buttons, plus a scroll bar to keep the table length limited and a spin button to determine the sort order.

My final table and chart look like this:

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Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart

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.

The Playfair Charts: Scotland ExIm Barchart

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.

The Playfair Charts: Wheat Price and Wages

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.

Somnath's Excel Charts

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