Using Excel to Construct Age Pyramids

Here's a slightly adapted version of instructions found at http://www.holderness.org/faculty/salibar/popwebpage.htm:
  1. Assemble the data in Excel, extracting values from the appropriate ArcView .dbf file by copying desired cells to a temporary Excel Sheet. This entails the use <control><c> (to copy multiple cells for transfer) and of 'Paste Special' with the "Transpose" option (to turn horizontally-arrayed data into single vertical columns). Male values can be made into negative values (so that they will display on the left side of the pyramid) by multiplying cells in the column by -1. An example of how the completed dataset should look in Excel is as follows: 
    Dominican Republic Population by Age and Sex for 1999 
Age         Male         Female 
00-04       -510         489 
5-9yr       -484         466 
10-14yr     -453         438 
15-19yr     -415         402 
20-24yr     -380         368 
25-29yr     -349         338 
30-34yr     -327         317 
35-39yr     -282         272 
40-44yr     -225         216 
45-49yr     -178         170 
50-54yr     -142         139 
55-59yr     -112         112 
60-64yr     -90           94 
65-69yr     -70           75 
70-74yr     -52           56 
75-79yr     -27           31 
80+yr       -22           28
  2. Select (by highlighting) the data for both males and females, as well as age category labels.
  3. Under Insert, select Chart... to awaken the Wizard.
  4. From Chart type, select Bar Chart and then Cluster Bar and follow the prompts at the bottom by hitting "Next" all the way through "Finish." You will get a graph on top of your data that you can drag to any location on your spreadsheet.
  5. Click on the graph's center vertical line and select Format. From the Patterns tab, set major and minor tick marks to “none” and set the tick mark labels option to “low.”
  6. Click on a bar in either male or female data series within the chart and select Format. From the Options tab, set the Overlap to 100 and the Gap Width to 0
  7. Click on the graph's horizontal axis and select Format. From the Numbers tab, select the custom number category format and enter in the following: 0;0 Doing this will eliminate the negative signs from the graph's labels.
  8. Resize the graph as desired, adjust font sizes, add labels and generally prettify
  9. Use 'Print Screen' and PhotoShop to create a .jpg for inclusion on a Web page.