Quality of Living Index 2010

I came across this data-set while reading about different visualization challenges in Visualization.org. An intriguing table where 194 countries are ranked and rated in diverse parameters to reveal the best place to live.

Strangely, there is no data for Sweden under the heading Cost of Living. Certainly, the data was either left out or not available for some obscure reason. It just seems to defy the belief that Sweden will score a "duck" in that category. That none of the Scandinavian countries made it to the top list is yet another surprise for me. Overall, the "Top 10" places to live, in descending order, are: France, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, New Zealand, Luxembourg, USA, Belgium, Canada and Italy.

Another idle afternoon spent in sweet excel company to create the following.

Some parting words, The scroll-bar and spin-button controls are active-X control elements, not form control elements. Given the inability to specify a dynamic maximum value for the scroll-bar, as is necessitated by the varying number of countries listed under different continents, this change was inevitable. Also, it meant macros needs to be enabled to allow the execution of a single line of code.

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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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