Countries Comparison

Production Notes

The data for each was entered by copy typing the values directly from the tables in the main source publications, the annual yearbooks of Encyclopædia Britannica, into a QuattroPro spreadsheet. I have been using QuattroPro, and its junior version, Quattro, since it was first provided. I have tried using its main competitor, Excel from Mocrosoft, but Excel does not provide the functionality that QuattroPro provides. Initially, QuattroPro was the only program which provided the necessary formatting capability as well. Specifically, Excel does not provide functionality which permits the value in a cell to be returned based on a maxiumum or minimum lookup of values in another column in a single-cell function string.

The tables for the years 2000 to 2009 were produced by pasting the spreadsheet directly into Frontpage 2000. Experienced authors of html code will appreciate that Frontpage 2000 automatically generates html code, but not in accordance with accepted standards according to the Worldwide Web Consortium. Accordingly, I “tidied” the code up using Araneae, a very neat and useful text editor which also provides a colour coding for different classes of html tags. Also, having been brought up on coding for programs in a much more primitive age of computing, I am not used to the amount of white space generated, so I eliminated most of the white space to provide the code in a form I could more readily read an interpret.

In 2011, I did not have the time to do the next table for 2010, but I did reformat the tables to make their code more consistent and to accommodate that fact I was moving towards css to style the web pages. In 2012, I made the transition from Microsoft to Apple, but that came with the downside that QuattroPro is only available in a Microsoft Windows (or similar) environment. However, Apple machines can be partitioned to provide a Windows operating system, so, in 2013, I began adding new tables from 2010 onwards, generating the tables using QuattroPro in the Windows operating system, generating html from QuattroPro (far from ideal), then transferring the tables over to the iMac for production of the finished tables using Dreamweaver. This is rather less elegant than previously, but it does get the job done.

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