Excel Hints & Tips – Florence Nightingale & Excel
What on earth has Florence Nightingale got to do with Excel?
Florence Nightingale famously created a polar area diagram (a type of pie chart) in 1858 to show the cause of death in British military hospitals in the Crimean War. This highlighted the extent of preventable deaths (such as from typhus and cholera). The result was that the British government took action and commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a new civilian hospital – reducing the death rate to just 1/10th of what it was before.
This important use of data visualisation shows how powerful charts (and especially pie charts) can be.
