Griffith Feeney
Objective To understand clearly the logical and empirical aspects of the population aging that most countries in the world are currently experiencing and to become familiar or extend your familiarity with the plotting features of Excel.
Step 1 Select a country (directory listing) and copy the file containing the age data for this country to your personal directory. Import this file into Excel and save it as an Excel file.
Step 2 Use Excel to make a series of plots of the age distribution to display future aging.
Step 3 Create a simple PowerPoint presentation containing plots and commentary on what they teach.
Note 1 Pay careful attention to the aspect ratio of your plots. “The aspect ratio of a graph is the height of the data rectangle divided by the width.” (Cleveland, Visualizing Data, page 88).
Note 2 To obtain comparable plots of different age distributions it is necessary to fix the range of the vertical axes in different plots.
Note 3 Different age distributions can be compared either by plotting two or more distributions on the same plot (but beware of “overloading” the plot) or by placing plots side by side.
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