This week was all about Excel! I came in with very little knowledge about it beyond how to input data into spreadsheets, but it’s always been something I’ve wanted to learn. On the same day we went over Excel for Vivero there was also a DASIL workshop for it so I got double the Excel. Parts of it remind me a lot of computer programming when you’re manipulating equations and generating random numbers. Other parts remind me of statistics when creating bar charts and stats summaries.
Within the Vivero Excel training, I created various bar charts comparing the average ages across the gender divide and other ones comparing the sum of individuals in specific age groups by gender. It was helpful to see slight differences in these stats; the average age of the female of the household was 3 years younger than that of males. However, the bar charts that Excel automatically generates have misleading scales.
In this bar chart, I was comparing the number of girls and boys under 5 years old. Upon first glance, it seems like there are way more young boys. The scale starts at 56 and goes up to 66 though, it’s a very limited scope. In the end, there are only 6 more boys than girls, despite the graph making it look very unequal.