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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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.

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 Dorling Cartogram

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...

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