Elvas Tower: Excel spreadsheet for ICC Commodity data - Elvas Tower

I have used this spreadsheet for transcribing data from the ICC Commodity Statistics report to digital data. It's an Excell 2010 spreadsheet, just one page. I've erased all of the ICC data that has been there, save one line so you can see how things should look when you are entering data.

The two areas for data entry and tinted blue and gray; Everything else is either titles or something computed on your behalf.

The spreadsheet is intended for just one railroad... what if anything you do for a second (a new tab or a new spreadsheet) is up to you.

WRT data entry, that is a tedious task. What I do is to start Commodity Class (e.g., Products of Forests) with the fewest number of rows and progressively work my way thru the rest, always selewcting the next largest Class as I go. For the most part I have enough patience to complete the smaller classes in one go but I do find the two larger ones, Products of Agriculture and Products of Manufacturing to have too many rows to complete in one siting. My advice on those two is to take a look at the commodity names and make an arbitrary sub-selection that will be your objective. Whether that is 10 rows or everything about Petrochemicals is up to you.

When each class is complete I do make a point of comparing the computed totals with the original report, looking for any discrepency due to data entry error. It happens.

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Considering whether you want to do the transcription the obvious question is "What does it give me that the photo image doesn't"? The answer is all of the interesting stuff. One of the things I do is figure out which commodites were most im portant to the railroad, both in terms of money and carloadings. If you copy the page with all of the data and paste it into a new page -- as data only -- you can then remove the lines between ther Classes (blank lines and subtotals) and then in columns off start adding formulas to compute percentages, some relative to grand totals, othrs relative to averages. You can sort it all, puting the largest percentages first. I am always surprised by the first 5 or 6 rows -- one example: One the most common carloads you'd see on the WP was of sand & gravel. One of the more im portant ones financial was military explosives. I had no idea and the discover, of course, leads to asking Why? Where? I'd never have looked save for this data.

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Terms and conditions -- use it how ever you want. If you share it, including indirectly from reporting on your findings, I would apprecaite including an anknowledgement of myself for having shared this w/ you.