Excel Tip Sheet

EXCEL TIP SHEET

We will use the older version of Excel for all of our exercises. You will find this in Programs/General Office Applications/Microsoft2003 directory on the classroom workstations. Importing Data We will use some of the files we download for a mapping exercise. Thus, we need to be careful to retain the geographic IDs as ‘text.’ To import our data, open Excel” Select ‘File/Open’ on the Menu choices. The file location is on the Desktop. You need to change from the default on Files of Type from Excel files to “All Files (*.*)”

Highlight the file name, which is ‘Poverty2006_Places.txt.’ Excel recognizes this as a delimited file, so go ahead and click on ‘Next.’ Select ‘comma’ as the delimiter if Excel does not make this choice for you. For one exercise, the delimiter will be a pipe (|). The pipe is found in the key under the Backspace on most keyboards. Click on ‘Next’ Excel allows you to define the format of each column. The first column is highlighted:

Move the cursor to the next column and click so that it is highlighted: Move the column data format (upper right) from the default of ‘General’ to ‘Text’

The second Geographic ID column (GEO_ID2) is the only column where the format is an issue. Thus, click on ‘Finish.’

To clean up the file, I will delete several columns (GEO_ID) and (SUMLEVEL) and delete the last few rows (data for Puerto Rico). Several columns need to be widened to see the contents (name of place) and/or to move from scientific notation to integers. To calculate the proportion in poverty, move the cursor on the ‘Column C’ and click on ‘Insert’ from the File Menu. Select ‘Columns.’ Label the column ‘poor’ in Row 1 and ‘F/D’ in Row 2.

To generate the percentage, click on the function tab:

The function tab is underneath all the menu commands and just above the view of the table: Select ‘PRODUCT’ as the function to use. Type ‘F3/D3’ in the box labeled Number 1. Click ‘OK.’ Copy the result (0.251473338) using right click/copy with the mouse. Highlight all the rows (with the shift/down arrow) until you come to the end of the file. Right click/paste and the formula will generate results for each cell. Sort the data to determine which places have the highest poverty rates. Click on the upper left corner to select the whole table – the table should be light blue. Click on ‘Data/Sort’ Select the sort key as ‘Poor’ and the direction as ‘Descending.’ Notice how many college towns have high poverty rates – College Station, TX, Bloomington, IN, etc. This is a function of the household types in these communities and the very low income most students report.