Soaring above the data

For years I was frustrated by big numbers. Some industry rep would come to Washington or get on the news and say, for example, "Toilet scrubbing brushes are a $100 million dollar industry, we can't allow it to be threatened." And I thought to myself: "Do I care? Should I? How much money is $100 million in the big picture?" I now imagine that banks and analysts keep similar spreadsheets fresh real time.

So I began cobbling together data by hand to put things in perspective and kept it in spreadsheets, usually on my desktop so I could update them frequently (which I rarely did). But, of course, the desktop is a perilous place for data, because it often doesn't get backed up, and that's bad on Windows machines in particular, which share certain properties with their namesakes (i.e. fragility).

So here's the current version of my spreadsheet, now up on Google and free for editing by anyone. Some of it's out of date. See also sheet two for adding good data sources. If you do feel like adding or updating, please initial where you make changes.