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Creating Population Pyramids Using Microsoft Excel: Getting Data
Creating Population Pyramids Using Microsoft Excel: Getting Data
Creating Population Pyramids Using Microsoft Excel: Getting Data
Population pyramids are a graphic tool used in demography to show the age and
sex structure of a population. This document will show how to make a population
pyramid in Excel 2013. **Note: If you use other versions of Excel, the user interface
(Excel menu bars) may be slightly different. Be patient and explore! If you really
cannot figure out, let Dr. Wang know.
Getting data
The U.S. Census Bureau’s website as well as its American Factfinder page is very
useful for finding age-sex data at the national, state and county levels. In this
assignment, data have been made available in an excel file – you can download
the data file from the same area where you find the assignment on the
Blackboard course website.
Suppose that you have the following data that have been input into an Excel
spreadsheet (note: this is NOT the actual data set that you will use). The first step
will be to calculate percentage for male and female population by age cohort
(see next page)
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2. Click the AutoSum
button
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9. By convention, in population pyramids
males are on the left-hand side of the
pyramid. In order for this to occur, the male
values must be negative.
This can be done in one of two ways: either
manually changing each value by placing a
negative sign in front of each value or by
using the formula option in Excel to
multiply each value by negative one. Once
you apply this formula to the first cell you
can drag and copy it to the other cells.
2. Select
the
3. Select Bar
Insert
Tab
4. Select Stacked Bar
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Formatting the Pyramid (steps on this page were recently revised in Excel 2016)
3. Select Labels
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If you use Excel 2010 or Excel 2007, here is how to bring up the Format Axis Panel.
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5. We made the values for males negative to ensure
that these are graphed on the left-side. The
horizontal axis is now labeled with negative values,
but they are confusing.
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7. Before you close Format Axis panel,
select Axis Options, then change
Major Unit from 2 to 1 (if it’s not 1
already). Close Format Axis panel
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11. Select the Fill & Line tab on
the Format Data Series panel
15. Change the title for the chart. Point to the text box and click once, the text box will be
selected. Click one more time, you will see cursor blinking inside the text box and you can
now edit the text by giving a title such as “Population Pyramid of xxx in Year yyy”. “xxx”
means the name of the place or country; yyy means year.
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16. If axis titles are not automatically added, we need
to add them. select the DESIGN Tab (appears after
the Chart area is selected)
If axis titles have been added, skip to Step 18
17. Select Add Chart Element,
then Axis Titles, and then
Primary Horizontal
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Here it is! This is how your final product looks like!
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