Marriage Stats

Extracting and parsing of statistical data (2017)

One evening while scrolling Facebook I noticed an offer in our university study group. The task was to obtain statistics about marriages in the Czech republic - specifically the ages of grooms and brides. The guy was willing to pay pretty good money (from the student's perspective) for the data, so I did not hesitate.

Fortunately, Czech Statistical Office has a pretty solid online portal with public datasets, so I found and downloaded data from all available years in XSL(X) documents. All that was left was to put together a script that would parse them, extract the desired information, and merge it together into a new spreadsheet. One last request from a client was to generate a heatmap from the statistics, which I promptly did and that's how I got my expenses for that year's summer festival covered :)

Lessons learned: How to parse Excel sheets and plot graphs with Python. Also how to make quick money on the side with programming.