Hopeful Towns: BID-BUILDER

HOW TO USE THE NATIONAL DATA

The value of the datasets in our National Data Library is in helping you to place your council in context. If, for example, you were bidding for money for a programme to support community pubs, it would be useful to demonstrate that there are a lack of assets like pubs in your area.

If you use the data then reference it using the URL link that comes up when you click on the 'source' cell in the library.

The most obvious way of using the national datasets is simply to describe in the text of your bid or proposal where your council sits within the national picture. For example, you could write that 'Castle Point is one of the most sparsely populated areas in terms of pubs, with the 12th highest number of residents to pubs in the UK, of 339 authorities'.

Another approach is to highlight where your authority sits using a table or index format. The example the the right looks at this for the 'residents per pubs' metric, picking out Castle Point council in Essex.

Steps for making a chart like this are as follows:

Create a new Excel document with three columns - ranking, local authority name, and the data itself
Pick out your council by highlighting, emboldening and increasing the font size
Keep the three column headings, but remove all of the rows ecept that containing your own authority and four or five rows above and below
Add in a grey row below the column headers, to show hat the highest ranking areas have been removed (unless your area is among the very highest ranking)
Format the cells you have left in terms of borders, font, alignment, etc, so that you are happy with the table you have left
Select the cells, copy, and paste into your Word document.

You can look at the data behind the example chart above by clicking here.

One way of using the national data is to create a bar chart, ordering all local authorities from the highest to the lowest on a given metric, and picking out your own. The example chart below uses the same data as the table above, in order to do this.

Steps for making a chart like this are as follows:

Create a new Excel document with council names in the first column and the data in the second
Select the data column and use 'sort and filter' option to order from the highest to lowest/ lowest to highest (depending on the metric)
Create a third column and move the figure for your council into that column
Use 'Control A' to select all data, then go to 'insert chart' and opt for a bar chart
To label your bar in the bar chart, right click on the bar for your council and go to 'add data label'
Right-click on the label itself, choose 'format data label' and select 'category name', so that it shows the name and not the number
Do any other additional formatting
To paste the chart into a Word document without losing the data right click the chart and select copy
Go to the place where you want to paste it, and choose the arrow under the paste button
Choose 'paste PNG' and it will appear in your Word document as an image

You can look at the data behind the example chart above by clicking here.