Combining age categories

[towol]

Hi everybody, this is my first but probably not my last, post in this forum.

I have struggled with this all day:

I have extensive data on some recent research on television habits. The data sample is way too extensive and i need to combine some categories. The categories include the response among 18-19 year olds, 20-21 year olds 22-23 year olds etc. As you can imagine this is not really useful. So I want to connect this data and have categories such as 18-25 year old etc. However, how do I combine the included data and turn it into one category INCLUDING percentage?

I am not sure whether I am explaining this right but hope you get the idea. Basically I have struggled with this for the last 4 hours or so.

Thanks for your help
/T

[Pete_UK]

It would help if you posted a sample workbook, perhaps with a Before and After sheet so it is clear what you want to achieve - the FAQ describes how to.

Pete

[towol]

Hi, thanks for replying - much appreciated. This is the data I have. What you see is what people within each age group has answered regarding TV habits. The sample size is 900 people. What I want to do is to have categories that show the data from 18-25 years old from 26 - 30 etc. Instead of simply 18-19 and 20-21 etc.
For example Age category 1 would then consist of 32+115+97+87+32+49 = 412 people.

Cat_A represents the answer "to obtain new information". For example 44% of 18-19 year old viewers watch in order to obtain new information. I hope this is clear?

Question: Why do you watch BBC News Channel:

AGE: 18 – 19 20 – 21 22 – 23 24 – 25 26 – 27 28-29....................etc
TOTAL (people): 32 115 97 87 32 49
_____________________________________________________________________
Cat_A 44% 31% 30% 24% 19% 37%
Cat_B 16% 18% 20% 14% 19% 18%
Cat_C 22% 30% 31% 33% 34% 16%
Cat_D 6% 10% 9% 16% 16% 10%
Cat_E 9% 3% 6% 9% 3% 16%
Cat_F 3% 8% 4% 3% 9% 2%

[towol]

ARGH, sorry the data gets all messed up when posting it...

[AliGW]

No, you were asked to attach the Excel workbook here, not a representation of it. Please do so.

[Pete_UK]

ARGH, sorry the data gets all messed up when posting it...

That's why I asked you to attach a sample workbook. It's a bit easier to follow in the email notification that I got, but you must realise that you can't add the percentages directly as you have different sample sizes for your age groups. You need to add the underlying values in each category for each age group that you want to combine, then you can add those and derive a new percentage by dividing by the total number in the combined age groups. I can't give you a formula as I don't know what cells you are using, nor do I know which combined age groups you want to use. It would be better to work from the raw data.

Hope this helps.

Pete