Monday, July 5, 2010

CORRECTED: New Excel Data Tool for Annual and Monthly Oregon Metro and Statewide Employment/ Unemployment Data, Jan. 2000-May 2010.

MANY thanks to a OHB subscriber who pointed out errors in the formulas in this Excel workbook. 

I have gone in and made changes in the Excel lookup formulas that I believe correct the problem. I have removed the old Excel file and changed the link below to link to a NEW version of this workbook, dated July 8th. My apologies to all.

Should you encounter a problem with the revised file, please DO let me know. 


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I have created a new Excel data tool HERE that allows the comparison of Oregon statewide AND metro area labor force, employment, and unemployment numbers, as well as unemployment rates. 

Data for any area chosen by the user can be compared on a monthly or an annual basis; the most recent month available is May 2010, and the oldest data is for January 2000. 

The first worksheet is a Pivot Table that provides two methods of comparison. The first is a quick comparison for two different time periods and includes an automatic calculation of the difference in the two time periods. The second method allows the user to select and compare up to 11 geographic and time periods. While there is no automatic combination of differences in this second method, I left a scratch pad area below to allow users to do their own calculations if they choose to do so. 

The default settings in the Pivot Table show quick differences in the May 2009 and May 2010 data for Bend. Looking at that data you will see that the number of unemployed and the unemployment rate both declined from May 2009 levels, but SO TOO did the number of employed and the size of the labor force.

The second default comparison in the Pivot table is of data for Oregon statewide for May of each year from 2000-2010.You can see that the total employment in Oregon grew by 12,000 from May 2000-May 2010. With a much large growth in the labor force of 149,000 however, the end result was that the unemployment rate increased from 5% to 11.6%.

The second worksheet in the workbook contains the monthly and annual raw data used to calculate the Pivot Table. 

Both worksheets are password protected where appropriate to prevent the inadvertent deletion of data. All data is from (federal) Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (Oregon data is retrievable HERE), and is NOT seasonally adjusted. 

PLEASE do let me know if you run into some problems in using the workbook, or questions about the data you see.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.

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