Griffith Feeney
Objective To learn, extend and/or consolidate your ability to use the computer programs called spreadsheets for manipulation of numeric and text data.
Pedagogical Notes For this exericse, as for many subsequent exercises, it is expected that at least several participants will already have the knowledge required, that they will volunteer to teach others in the group what they know, and that the group will organize itself in an appropriate way for this learning during the early afternoon session. Questions or problems may be taken up during the late afternoon Q&A and Discussion session.
Exercise 1 Select a very simple table from a census publication and enter the data it contains into a spreadsheet, including title, row and column labels, notes and bibliographic information. Learn how to highlight a table cell and enter a number or text into it. Learn early how to save a file, giving it a name and directory location. Do this before keying in a lot of numbers you might loose. Print out the table you entered and check it against the source for errors. Correct any errors you find. You may want to refer to Exercise 2 below before beginning this exercise, and you may skip this exercise if you wish and go directly to Exercise 2 if you are sure you know how to save and retrieve the data you have entered.
Exercise 2 Enter a table of census data for one of the topics on the workshop syllabus, coordinating your work with that of other participants so that the collective result at least one table for each topic shown (see the list below). You may share work on larger tables. Be sure to enter title, labels, notes and bibliographic information. Numbers alone are meaningless! Check your keying using sum checks (enter sums of columns or rows shown, summ the rows or columns, and compare the entered sum with the computed sum).
Exercise 3 Using Explorer or a DOS window, look at the list of file names in the directory Data/AgeData. You will see the names of each country represented in the group with the extension '.ad' for 'age distribution. Try opening one of these files in Excel, and follow the resulting dialogue boxes. Add row and column labels (rows are 0-4, ..., 75-79, 80+, columns 1950, 1955, ..., 2050 and a one line title.
Exercise 4 Use the spreadsheet do some simple analysis of the census data entered in the preceding two steps. E.g., compute the age distribution of the total population from the male and female age distributions, compute percentage age distributions and percent distributions of women by number of children ever born, and compute proportions of men and women literate or employed in each age group. Learn how to use the summation button on the tool bar and the copy and paste features to avoid unnecessary labor in this work. Learn to use the buttons for changing the number of places shown after the decima
Exercise 5 Use the plotting capability of Excel to make several line plots of the table you entered. Experiment with changing the various features of plots, including the range of the horizontal and vertical scales, the size of the axis labels, the size, type and color of symbols used to plot data points, and the thickness, pattern and color of lines connecting plotted points. Print out a few of these plots.
Exercise 6 Create a spreadsheet showing names and short alphameric codes for some census item, such as names of first level administrative units or occupational or industrial codes. Include a column for row number, a column for the code, and a column for the name coded. Use the [Sort] command to sort the rows of this able by the short codes and by the full names. Sort on row number to regain the original order (not also the use of the Undo button on the tool bar).
Exercise 6 Using a text editor, such as Notepad or TextPad, inspect the file sspws2/resources/cdmltf/cdwf.txt. Clip out the data for a life table with an expectation of life at birth appropriate to your country and save it in a new file. Import this file into Excel and save it in Excel format. Delete all columns except age and Lx. Add the 1L0 and 4L1 values to give 5L0 to obtain a complete series of 5Lx values for five year age groups. Use these values to compute a set of survivorship ratios, that is, ratios of the form 5L(x+5) divided by 5Lx for x = 0, 5, 10, .... Please be sure that at least one participant does this exercise, as it will be needed in a future exercise.
- Population by age in five year groups and sex
- Women/ever married women by age in five year groups and number of children ever born (only women over a certain minimum age will be included, but the age varies between countries)
- Population by age in five year groups, sex and literacy (only persons over a certain minimum age will be included, but the age varies between countries)
- Population by age in five year groups, sex and educational attainment (only persons over a certain minimum age will be included, but the age varies between countries)
- Population by age in five year groups, sex and economic activity status (only persons over a certain minimum age will be included, but the age varies between countries)
- A migration flow table, such as population aged five years old and over by place of residence five years ago and place of current residence
- A table showing the size of population of specific cities (not urban areas as a whole)
- Any table you can find showing household structure, preferably one showing distribution by age in five year groups
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