Because there is something deeply broken in me, I love working in Excel. I have a lot of fun getting the most usable information possible out of whatever dataset I have available and then making it pretty. Or, as pretty as Excel will let me. Beauty is in the eye of the administrative professional. Anyway, this page is a collection of those efforts, put here so they don’t languish unappreciated in a folder somewhere.

---

Wage Planner 9000

Wage Planner 9000 is a simple tool for determining what your effective hourly wage will be, along with your monthly and annual net income. You can adjust the deductions cell to be whatever is most accurate for what comes out of your paycheck before it gets deposited – 35% is pretty high, but it’s a good place to start if you have no idea and want to be very conservative in your planning.

---

Voting Power Tracker 9000

Voting Power Tracker 9000 is a little more complicated, as it draws source data from a number of tables published by the US Census Bureau (available here). With this tool, you can select any two states and see the comparative “worth” of each voter’s vote compared to that of a voter in any other state. The fun thing about this setup is that, when new tables become available, I can quickly dump that data into the source I’ve built and the tool will be updated for that year. Barely an inconvenience.

---