Tutorial: Motion Chart on African Nations

I have looked further into the visualization of GDP per capita versus percent GDP spent on military I created earlier in the semester and wanted to write a quick tutorial on how I altered the Google spreadsheet in order to focus on African nations and what this chart reveals about that continent.  

The first step was quite simple but time consuming. I had to go through the data and delete the data on 95 different nations to leave 35 remaining African countries that had sufficient data.

 Next I separated the 35 nations into the five UN geographical sub-regions: Northern, Western, Central, Southern, and Eastern.

After grouping the nations under these regions and gave each region a numerical value so I could distinguish them by color on the motion chart.

Northern (1), Western (2), Central (3), Southern (4), Western (5)

When finished, simply select “Insert”, then “Chart”, “Charts”, “Trend”, then finally the image of a motion chart to the right of Trend. Select “Insert” and the chart will be inserted onto your tab containing your data. If you select the drop box at the upper right hand corner of the chart, you can then select “Move to own sheet,” that way you don’t have to move the chart around to look at your data. 

Once the chart is created, select the “Color” drop box and select “Region.” This will color coordinate the nations based on the regions in which they are located.  Then select the “Size” drop box and select “Population.” This will obviously base the size of the nation indicators on the population of the nation.

Now just press the play button in the bottom left corner of the chart and watch the motion chart at work.

Data from WorldBank