Modeling the Ogallala Aquifer on the Texas High Plains

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Utilizing Data Bases with Excel

Students can gather masses of information from the Texas Water Development Board.  This information can be obtained in text form that can be opened in Excel and converted to a spreadsheet.  The following information will give you a step by step guide on how to gather this information and utilize it in an Excel chart.

1.  For areas in the panhandle of Texas interested in data from water wells in the Ogallala Aquifer, use the Region 16/17 Registered Well Data (Texas Panhandle).

2.  The data dictionary will give you information found in the data sets.  Click on the txt files for the type of data that you need.  This file will open in your browser and you can save it to your disk. 

3.  Open Excel and select file, open, change files of type to text files, and click on the text file that you saved.  The text import wizard will open and you will need to select the delimited choice of original data type, start import at row 1, file origin is windows (ANSI), and select next.  Step 2 of the import wizard will allow you to select the delimiters which in this case is other and you will need to select the | (pipe) character.  Step 3 is your call as you can label individual components of the spreadsheet and finish your task.  You know have a spreadsheet of your well data and can start manipulating the data for graphing.