Category Archives: History Through Spreadsheets

Countries That Are Graying Fastest

Posted on 1-October-2017 by mathscinotes

I have been working hard to address the issues associated with an aging workforce (blog post). However, aging is problem for the entire world – the median age of the world is increasing. Aging populations put enormous strains on the infrastructure of country. I have been reading quite a few articles lately on the effect of aging populations on quite a few developed nations: South Korea, China, Germany, and Italy. Many nations are facing the problems associated with aging populations: high medical expenses, providing elder care, paying pensions, etc. Continue reading →

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WW2 Tank Production Comparison Between Combatants

Posted on 22-September-2017 by mathscinotes

Quote of the Day At least you figured it out. My first two husbands never did. — Female employee told me this after I mentioned that my wife's nickname for me was "The Paycheck" – this nickname was a joke … Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, History Through Spreadsheets, Military History | 15 Comments

Retired Hurricane Name Statistics

Posted on 18-September-2017 by mathscinotes

I was reading an article that stated that names of Hurricane Harvey and Irma could be the eighth pair of back-to-back hurricane whose names have been retired since the 1954. I have never thought about which hurricane names have been retired, so I started to search around the web. As usual, the Wikipedia provided an excellent data source. Continue reading →

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Hurricanes and Typhoons Ranked By Air Pressure

Posted on 7-September-2017 by mathscinotes

I was watching the weather reports on Hurricane Erma and the discussions on how powerful it is. The most cited metrics for hurricanes and typhoons appears to be wind speed and eye barometric pressure (see Figure 1). I decided to look around for hurricane and typhoon strength data and the Wikipedia turned out to have a page containing large number of tables for all the most intense typhoons and hurricanes in different regions of the world. I used Power Query to (1) import the tables, (2) clean them up, (3) combine them, and (4) rank the storms by air pressure. Continue reading →

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Baby Name Frequency Ranking Using Power Query

Posted on 5-September-2017 by mathscinotes

You may have noticed that many of my recent posts are focused on data processing and analysis. These recent posts reflect the fact that I am preparing for a career change as I near "retirement," and I plan on working in the data analysis arena. This means that I have been in serious Python, R, and statistics training. While I love working with Python and R, I keep finding myself drawn back to Excel and Power Query (aka Get and Transform) for quick, ad hoc analysis work. While this blog will look at the frequency over time of the name Mark, you can use the tool to generate the same chart for any name. Continue reading →

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets, Personal | 2 Comments

Using Excel to Plot Year of Dedication and Locations of Confederate Monuments

Posted on 19-August-2017 by mathscinotes

I heard some discussion on television about all the Confederate monuments around the country and when they were erected. I decided to look for the data and plot it for myself. I very quickly found a document from the Southern Poverty Law Center that looked interesting and provided me some interesting data tidying and charting challenges. My focus here is on duplicating their chart of monuments dedications dates. This chart type is not a standard Excel type and I wanted to see how I could duplicate it. This workbook will be used in a charting seminar that I plan to present in a month or so. Continue reading →

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets, News Fact Checking | 1 Comment

US WW2 Submarine Tonnage Sunk Database

Posted on 26-July-2017 by mathscinotes

While answering a recent question about the tonnage sank by the top US submarine skippers during WW2, I realized that I had not made available my conversion of the JANAC data for vessels sunk by US submarines. The JANAC records are considered the official records because they were cross-checked with information from Japanese records. Continue reading →

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets, Military History | 2 Comments

Visualizing US vs IJN Aircraft Carrier Numbers During WW2

Posted on 26-June-2017 by mathscinotes

I watched an interesting lecture on American History TV this weekend called Japanese Perspective on the Battle of Midway by Anthony Tully. The most interesting part of the discussion occurred when Tully began showing how the US production of aircraft carriers eventually overwhelmed the Japanese ability to build carriers. He used some simple graphs to show the relative carrier strength of the US Navy versus the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) over time. In this post, I will come up with my own graphics to visualize this information. Continue reading →

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Royal Navy Losses in WW2

Posted on 14-April-2017 by mathscinotes

I have been doing quite a bit of reading lately on WW2 naval actions, and I have been putting together tables that show me ship losses by year. This information gives me a feel for the tempo of battle during the war. I first looked at US naval losses (link) and am now looking at the Royal Navy losses (Figure 1). Continue reading →

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US Naval Losses in WW2

Posted on 29-March-2017 by mathscinotes

I have been putting together some information on US naval actions during WW2. Specifically, I wanted to look at US Naval losses by year during WW2 in order to get a feel for the change in battle tempo over time. The Wikipedia has an excellent page on all the US naval losses during WW2, so I simply downloaded this page, cleaned it, up and generated an Excel pivot table (Figure 1). The breakdown by combatant type is my own, everything else is from the Wikipedia. Continue reading →

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets | 6 Comments