Spreadsheets useful reporting tool

Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the usefulness of spreadsheets as a reporting tool.

Many newsroom managers may be more familiar with spreadsheets from the often-dreaded task of setting expense and payroll budgets for their newsrooms each year. Working for Swift Newspapers (http://www.swiftcom.com) in California several years ago marked by my first introduction to the world of spreadsheet formulas and data crunching for yearly budget preparations.

Through the years, however, I found that spreadsheets can also be a useful, timesaving tool in reporting on a variety of stories from the business beat to standardized school test scores. In fact, I now enjoy any opportunity to make use of this handy tool in daily reporting, much to the dismay of my fellow journalists who’ve been known to scoff at my enthusiasm, even roll their eyes at me.

One trick to using a spreadsheet is mastering the formulas that resemble algebra equations. The solution is to ask your business manager for help. Our business manager, Cherrie Nelson, has been a great resource for me, helping me write the formulas and showing me new tricks.

Let me give you a few examples of how spreadsheets can be a valuable reporting tool:

Tracking tax collections: For years, we’ve tracked the monthly sales tax collections for about 18 municipalities in our coverage area, reporting the findings on a chart appearing on our Sunday business page. Tracking the revenues is a good tool to measure retail sales locally and compare how one city stacks against another.

When our business reporter left several months ago, I took on the job of doing the sales tax report while searching for a replacement. He had been making the tedious calculations by hand each month; I decided to let the spreadsheet do the work for me.

The data was readily available from the state’s Web site in a downloadable spreadsheet. I simply pulled out the relevant data I was looking for, formatted the information to meet our needs and told it what I wanted it to do by inputting a formula. The value is unmatched – the data is available at any time throughout the year, the calculations are free of human error, and I can access and compare data figures simply by moving a column or writing a new formula to suit my needs.

I’m also going to apply this tool to track local collections on a motel tax recently adopted by the city.

School test scores: August marks the return to school in our area and the release of the annual state standardized test scores as well each school’s rating on the federal No Child Left Behind system. As any reporter or editor who has attempted to read these data knows, this is no easy task. Several years ago, however, I discovered that using a spreadsheet to compare test scores from previous years for each school district made the task easier.
Again, the state offers the data in a downloadable spreadsheet from which I pull data on our local school districts, format the data to compare the current year, data from three previous years and the state average. I then write a formula to compare the change in the test scores from the previous year.

The resulting information is given to reporters to aid them in writing stories, and we publish the data for each of our local school districts in the paper. Our readers can easily follow each district’s and each grade’s progress in reading, language and math, using the resulting chart.

Directories: Spreadsheets can also be used to compile text data, such as addresses, phone numbers, e-mails, etc. It’s a useful business task for mailing labels and business contacts, but I’m going to use it to create a directory for a medical directory we’re publishing this spring.

By inputting the names, addresses, specialties and other relevant data in the spreadsheet, I can organize the information in a number of fashions – doctors by specialty, alphabetic, etc. – without having to retype the information as would be needed if it were done in a word processing document. The information can also be updated as needed, and ready for use the next year with little work needed.

For the techies out there, these directories can also be exported to your PDA.