Data Mining with Spreadsheets¶
by Ronald Campbell of the Journalist at the Orange County Register
Useful links¶
The CPS table creator allows to mine data from the March analysis of Census data.
Workforce data to consider for immigrant data analysis¶
Generate a report using the following criteria
- Education Attainment (sidebar)
- Nativity: Point of origin (sidebar)
- California (topbar)
You should now have data worth mining!
Time to interview the data!¶
- Paste the generated data into your spreadsheet of choice.
- Select the highest row with numbers and enter something like into the first empty cell to the right: =D1/B1
- Copy/paste the formula only to the empty cells corresponding to the other rows.
- Format the results to show percentages
Adjusting the Data¶
Under ‘Data Options’ change the year to 2007 (sidebar)
Formula for comparing 2012 with 2007:
new - old / old
What does this show?¶
Incoming workforce with high school and post-high school education dropped
Surprise: Incoming workforce with bachelor’s degree or higher is increasing.
- Might be because more immigrants coming in have bachelor’s degrees.
- Might be because more immigrants are getting bachelor’s degrees.
- No way to figure out what this means from the data available. We need a journalist to investigate!
Foreign Born Workers¶
- Choose 2012 (sidebar)
- Table definitions are state and nativity (sidebar)
- Refresh
Visualizing the Results¶
I used Many Eyes (http://bit.ly/many-eyes) to quickly visualize the data. See