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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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