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INTRODUCTION

This information paper provides an outline of changes to the Wage and Salary Earners, Public Sector, Australia (cat. no. 6248.0.55.001) AusStats Time Series Spreadsheets.


CHANGE TO MICROSOFT EXCEL FORMAT

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has introduced a new method of presenting time series data to the AusStats service. The Lotus 1-2-3 time series spreadsheets are being replaced with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. A sample of the layout for Wage and Salary Earners, Public Sector, Australia of the new spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel format (.xls) is attached to this Information Paper.

For the March 2005 issue of Wage and Salary Earners, Public Sector, Australia (cat. no. 6248.0.55.001) the AusStats Time Series Spreadsheets are provided in the usual Lotus 1-2-3 format (.wks).

From the June 2005 issue of Wage and Salary Earners, Public Sector, Australia (cat. no. 6248.0.55.001), due for release on 15 September 2005, the AusStats Time Series Spreadsheets will only be presented in Microsoft Excel format (.xls).

A concordance between the current AusStats tables (Lotus 1-2-3 .wks format) and the new tables (Microsoft Excel .xls format) is included below.

The Microsoft Excel spreadsheets offer clearer presentation, simpler data navigation and retrieval, and enhanced metadata content over the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. The new format files can be opened, read and manipulated using Excel 5.0/95 (or equivalent), however, some features will not be available unless you have Excel 97 (or a later version).

CHANGES TO SPREADSHEET CONTENT

In addition to the file format change, some of the content of the spreadsheets has changed. These changes apply to the data provided in Microsoft Excel format only:

• Included in the spreadsheets are data relating to Standard Errors.

• The presentation of the data has changed. For instance, time periods are represented by rows, and data items by columns.