Simple Census Age Table

Nov15

9 Comments

While watching today’s Ancestry.com webinar and seeing Crista Cowan‘s census table, I noodled around on the Google and created a quick version for download. Just enter names, birth and death years and it will calculate the persons age during each census from 1850 to 1940.

Act now and it will also gray out cells for censuses in which the person was not around!

Below is a static version – apparently you can embed Google spreadsheets, but they aren’t editable. Visit this link to use a live version of it.

Until relatively recently, there was no way to lock particular cells in a Google Docs spreadsheet. They have reported that cell protection now has been implemented – but I have found it doesn’t really work properly, thusly I am leaving the whole sheet editable for now.

So, Please be sure just to change the data in the green cells if you try it out!

(Don’t worry, I’ve got copies in case the sheet gets borked. And hey you – YES YOU, we all know you don’t have any Walter Melons in you tree so no funny names, Mister Smartypants.)

You can also download a copy to use in your own Excel or Open Office software by clicking File… Download As… and saving it to your computer.

Makes a great stocking stuffer!

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9 Comments

Comment by Crista Cowan — November 15, 2011 @ 3:28 pm

This is great, John. I’m glad you found the video cast helpful. And I think it’s terrific that you created this spreadsheet! It really is one of my biggest (now not-so) secret weapons of genealogy research.
Comment by John — November 15, 2011 @ 3:36 pm

It was helpful – thanks! And that was too good an idea not to set up a sheet right away.
Comment by Regina Hall Ivie — January 15, 2012 @ 10:56 am

Thank you for this very nice tool, I’ll be using this.
Comment by Marian Pierre-Louis — June 30, 2012 @ 7:50 am

Very helpful! Thanks John!
Comment by Jean Perera — June 30, 2012 @ 10:10 am

After reading Marian’s blog this morning, I immediately came to yours and downloaded this tool. Thank you very much for sharing this with everyone. I can see how useful it will be.
Comment by Jim Gill — June 30, 2012 @ 11:20 am

Nice job, John. Thank you!
Comment by Susan — July 2, 2012 @ 4:23 pm

I downloaded the file – then tried to open and for the first ever a security warning came up saying malicious and could try to take over my computer!!!!
Comment by John — July 2, 2012 @ 4:41 pm

@Susan, As the document is nothing more than a Google Doc spreadsheet, there is nothing malicious about it.

But, I did just run a test by downloading the sheet from Google Docs in Excel format, then opened it in the newest version of Excel. It looks like this latest Excel version has a “Protected Mode” that by default is enabled for any spreadsheet downloaded from the Internet.

While that is certainly a good thing, the message “Office has detected a problem with this file. Editing it may harm your computer” is VERY poorly written.

Assuming you are seeing the same message, if you click the “more information” link and read through the Excel help pages on it, you’ll see that it is not saying the file IS malicious, but that it has been put in protected mode by default because it came from the Internet.

You can click on protected mode view settings and turn off different things, but I have not played with protected mode at all yet. In any case, confusing even to me and I’m an information technology and security professional!

If you are leery of this or any other Excel file, a good trick would be to download the file, then upload it to your own Google Docs and use it there. Then you would not have to worry about any security risks as all the processing is done on their server and not your PC.
Comment by Susan — July 2, 2012 @ 9:01 pm

Thank you.