Creating a population pyramid in Excel

Part of my job involves working with demographic data. One of the common ways in which to represent population statistics is through charts, the most common being the population pyramid, which provides a consise overview of the structure of a population according to gender and age.

I also love Excel, but one of the niggling frustrations about Excel is that it does not provide the population pyramid as a chart option. But all is not lost, as it is possible – with just a bit of tinkering – to manually create a population pyramid in Excel. There are useful guides on the internet on how to build one from scratch (see here, for example), but what I’ve done is attach to this post an Excel file I created that can be easily used to create population pyramids for presentations and reports. You are welcome to download this file and use it for your own work.

Download: Excel – Population Pyramid (85+).xlsx

The file above consists of two worksheets:  Data and Chart. If you look at Data, you will see that I’ve already added population figures for the City of Johannesburg, from Statistics South Africa’s 2007 Community Survey. In order to create your own population pyramid, simply replace (by pasting or typing in) the male and female figures in the white cells below the headings of Male and Female.

Copy the data into the table

Once you have added the figures, click on the Chart worksheet to see the resulting pyramid. You can then right click on the pyramid and copy it into another application, such as Word or PowerPoint.

Population pyramid for City of Johannesburg

The age groups in this pyramid end at 85+. If you have data where the age ranges end at 80+ or even 100+, please let me know and I will create other Excel files to represent more (or less) groups.

If this has been useful to you, please let me know by leaving a short comment.

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Update: (22 Feb 2012): for those of you who want to play around with the actual table and graph settings, the password to unprotect the Excel file is pyramid. I also want to thank Helen North, who originally introduced me to an earlier version of an Excel population pyramid.