Because I'm The Biggest Dork EVER.

So I thought it'd be fun to play around with the US Census Bureau's Excel spreadsheets they make available to the public. I made some Excel Functions that showed which parts of the country are growing fastest, which are on the decline and which are in the top ten. Surprisingly, Wilmington and Raleigh in North Carolina are growing* at a very fast rate, while San Francisco, although still growing, has seen less growth than St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Anyway, I have no idea how to load this spreadsheet onto this blog. (Anyone have a clue?) There are over 14,000 cells, so I don't want to try and copy/paste the whole thing on here...that would be cruel. And torturous. I just want to make it available to anyone who is curious about growth levels throughout the country.

So you can e-mail me if you want the spreadsheet and I'll reply with it, or someone can instruct me on how to make it available for download. Either way, I had fun :-).

Random Facts:

*Growth is defined as the change in population from the Census in 2000 to the projections of the Census Bureau in 2008.

-Columbus and Minneapolis share very similar growth (about 10%).
-Orlando has about 20% growth. (yikes!)
-Las Vegas was at the top of growth of any major metropolitan--over 27%!
- In 8 years, the Detroit Metro area did not see any growth. The decline of the total area was over 111,000 which is enormous...but by percentage, since the metro area has over 4.5 million people, the change is not that large.
- Denver's Metro has 800,000 less people than Minneapolis/St. Paul!
- Palm Coast, Florida has the highest percentage of growth in people--over 45%!
- Youngstown, Ohio had the 6th largest number of population loss. And this is not by percentage--this is by total loss. They lost 37,000 people! Dayton ranked 8th with a loss of 11,000 people.
- Dallas, Texas has the largest growth by population number--they increased their population by 1,138,000 million people in just 8 years!

Ok. That was fun. And probably a waste of time. :-P