News-Record.com

We have a copy of the 2008-09 Guilford County budget, line item by line item, in this handy dandy Excel file. (Warning: it's a big file and may take a bit to download.)

For county geeks, it's kind of like the Rosetta Stone that explains what money goes where.

But first, you have to know a little bit about how to navigate pivot tables in Excel. When Michael Halford, the county's budget director gave a little walk-thru to Scoop on navigating the budget, he said pivot tables were "like a cube that you can turn around and look at in different ways."

It's also a handy tool for ranking your selections for your fantasy football draft, if you're into that.

As for using them, here's a primer on pivot tables.

But if you just want to see where the government spent more money in 2008-09, you can open the file, click on "Base/Expansion", drag it down to the right of the "Dept" column. On the "Base/Expansion" column, click on the little arrow that points down, and check Expansion. Then grab "Division/AU" from above and drag that to the right of "Base/Expansion". It should look like this:

Dragging and so on, you can slice it any number of ways. Have fun.