US Cancer Stats 2010

I do habitually trawl a lot of websites. Partly because of my interests, partly due to my commitments, and some because I'm concerned. One among the last is The American Cancer Society Inc. A comprehensive website that incorporates A-Z of cancer. From learning about the disease to its treatment and from all relevant data to a chance to volunteer and make a difference, it includes all. The data is from the section Cancer Facts and Figures 2010. I know a similar page exists for the year 2011, but I'd rather wait for the year to be over and the numbers updated, so I can then not only look at the data, but also perform a meaningful comparison against the previous year.

The dataset is taken from page 3 of the PDF file, titled "Estimated new cancer cases and deaths by sex for all sites, US, 2010". Sadly, there can be no correlation between new cases and deaths, so, my main focus was to find the best way possible to represent this data in a dashboard. To make this more challenging, I desisted from using macros, and decided to use Pie-charts!

To keep the dashboard simple, I've used a pair of List Boxes, and the type selected in one will populate the related sub-types in the second.

After about 30 minutes of playing with the data, the dashboard came out as below:

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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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