Microsoft Excel: MLB Payrolls exercise
This is a beginner exercise for learning some of the most commonly used formulas and functions in Excel. It uses an Excel spreadsheet called “MLB Payrolls 2009_2011” that has two worksheets. We’re going to use the worksheet called “MLB Payrolls,” which has one record for each team in Major League Baseball, with three columns of numbers. These columns represent the total each team spent – each year – on player salaries.
Our goal, as journalists, is to look for some patterns and trends in this information.
Let’s start by thinking of some questions we might want to know about the money spent on player
salaries in professional baseball.

Some possibilities:
Which team had the greatest increase in its spending?
Which team had the greatest decrease?
How much money was spent overall in the league on salaries and how has that changed over time?
What’s the average payroll in the league?
Who was the highest paid player?
What’s the average player salary?