Analysing population data using Excel

THERE ARE OVER 6 BILLION PEOPLE alive today! In the next 50 years the number will rise to over 9 billion. But one fifth of the world's population does not have enough to eat.

This exercise is to help you understand how the worlds' population is changing. We will be looking at statistics for two countries, India and the UK.

Part one teaches you how to use a spreadsheet to assess how fast the world's population is growing.

Part two introduces you to population pyramids.

Part three is an assesment to see how much you have learned.

At the end of the exercise you will hand in a Word document containing a variety of graphical presentations and a written description of your findings.

PART ONE - POPULATION GROWTH

We are going to find out how population is changing in India by drawing a chart using Excel

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Step: 1

1) Start Excel by clicking on the Excel icon on your computer desktop. You may need to reduce the size of your Internet Explorer window first.

	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2010	2020	2030	2040	2050
Population of India	369,880	445,857	555,043	690,462	850,558	1,017,645	1,182,171	1,340,865	1,484,847	1,607,752	1,706,951

2) Copy the table above by clicking the mouse button and dragging across the table. Right click the mouse on the highlighted cells and choose "copy" to save all the data to the clipboard.
3) Paste the selection into a new Excel sheet.
4) Draw a chart to show India's population growth by highlighting the all the data cells and clicking the chart wizard button
5) Select a clustered column style bar chart and click "next"
6) Complete the boxes to add the labels for the axes.
7) Click "next" and then "finish".

You can change the size of the font used for the axes labels by clicking on them and making changes in the format axis box. You can investigate other options to change colours to the bars etc.
Finally, save your work as " India population"

Step 2:

Now make two more bar graphs to show population change in the UK and the World using the figures below. Don't forget to save the finished graphs!

UK data* (figures in thousands)

	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2010	2020	2030	2040	2050
Population of UK	50,127	52,372	55,632	56,314	57,507	59,247	59,956	60,177	59,430	57,251	54,116

World data* (figures in thousands)

	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2010	2020	2030	2040	2050
Population of the world	2,556,000	3,039,451	3,706,561	4,453,778	5,276,991	6,073,105	6,831,731	7,562,050	8,214,713	8,810,692	9,298,542

Step 3:

Cut and paste each of your bar graphs into a new Word document. Save your work and then go on to part two

*Source: US Census Bureau

Go to part two