Sunday, February 03, 2008
Charting Economic Time Series with Shaded Recessions
If you read the business press or government economic reports, then you have undoubtedly seen charts that show recessionary periods with shading. In this post I will demonstrate how to create this type of chart in Excel 2007. The same technique is applicable to all versions of Excel, though the mechanics of creating the charts in earlier versions are slightly different. Users of other spreadsheets, such as Open Office Calc should be able to use a similar procedure.
Obviously, if we are to chart an economic data series and shade the recessions then we need data. For this post I will be
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Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Dealing With Unusual Date Formats
I’m sure that you have all been through this: You go to a Website (or a database, probably from a mainframe) to get some data. The problem is that the dates are formatted in some obscure way that Excel doesn’t understand. In this post, I’ll give you an idea of how to convert these dates into something that you can work with.
Yesterday I was working on a project that involves charting some economic data series. Frequently, charts of economic time series show shaded areas that indicate a period of recession (I’ve got a post that shows how to do that). So, I needed to know the dates for
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