Spreadsheet Data Exploration

For a long time, I have been at a loss as to the kinds of things Microsoft Excel can do. Spreadsheets full of data are not only organized in specific rows and columns based on categories of some sort (i.e. year, country, etc.), but the data can be duplicated, copied, and analyzed using multiple techniques that are programmed into Microsoft Excel. For this exploration, I took data from the web regarding demographics about Texas and used the abilities of the spreadsheet to create and explore relationships between different sets of data. I was able to see if there were any pieces of data that seemed inaccurate, continue patterns down columns, and analyze how accurate they are compared to actual measured data, and analyze possible relationships between different categories.

Here is the spreadsheet I created to analyze this specific data.

All of the data gathered (and the data I created from the given data) are all from the years 1984 through 2001. In the year column, I expanded the column down all the way to 2024 to hopefully create estimations of certain data in the future. I researched and found the actual data for the year 2017 and compared it to the estimations, and while they are similar, they are relatively fairly different from each other.  I gathered marriages, divorces, births, deaths, infant deaths, and maternal deaths. In addition, I created columns to calculate the marriage rate, divorce rate, birth rate, death rate, deaths from deliveries, and deaths not from deliveries. I created these rates based on the population to make these data sets more accurate, as the population is dynamic throughout the years. In each of these columns of data I created, I took the number of [marriages, births, etc.] and divided it by the product of the corresponding population in column B and 1,000,000, as the values in column B are in millions. I then multiplied this entire value by 1,000 to get the number of individuals per 1,000 in the population that would get married, or be born, etc. I then dragged the cell down and created an entire column with this formulaic pattern.

To format my spreadsheet, I double-clicked the tops of each column to make the width of the column dependent on fitting all the data to make it all visible. I then selected B2 to freeze the top row and the far left column in order to make them stationary as you scroll through the spreadsheet. This helps interpret the data with the years and the category always visible.

Overall, I learned a lot of different strategies to create a helpful Excel spreadsheet in order to analyze data, create my own based on the data given, and make the spreadsheet look presentable.