Monthly Archives: December 2018

US Cruiser Production During WW2

I have been working through the book Collect, Combine and Transform Data Using Power Query in Excel and Power BI by Gil Raviv – it is an excellent Power Query (PQ) resource. I particularly like the methods discussed in Chapter 10, which focused on how to make your queries robust, that is, insensitive to minor deviations in the input data. Chapter 10 spoke to me, and I immediately began looking for some practice data that suffered from common inconsistencies: headings in different cases, minor spelling errors in the data body, and inconsistent wording (example, "Co." instead of "Company"). I found that data in the Wikipedia's information on US WW2 cruisers. In this post, I will look at the production of cruisers by the US during WW2. See Figure 1 for a typical example of a WW2 US light cruiser. Continue reading

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets, Naval History | 2 Comments

US Submarine Production During WW2

One WW2 topic that continues to intrigue me was how US war planners kept the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) at bay long enough to build a large naval force. The key was the use of submarines for commerce raiding to disrupt the war material supply chain and tie down Japanese surface forces with convoy defense duty. This post will use Power Query to scrape the Wikipedia for this data. The Wikipedia is becoming a wonderful source for WW2 information. Continue reading

Posted in Excel, History Through Spreadsheets, Naval History | 1 Comment

Calculating the Pointing Angle for My Television Antenna

I spend quite a bit of time at a cabin I have built in northern Minnesota. Technically, I spend most of my time in the garage on the site and I have decided that I need to be able to watch the local television stations in Duluth. These stations are ~75 miles away and I need to determine the bearing along which to point my antenna. This seemed like a good Excel exercise that I can also use as an example for those I tutor at the Hennepin County Library. There are web calculators available that perform this calculation (example), but it is more fun doing it myself. Continue reading

Posted in Electronics, Excel | Comments Off on Calculating the Pointing Angle for My Television Antenna