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How to Download Files
 

Zipped Collection of HMD Statistics (New)

To facilitate the use of HMD data in research projects, we now have available a package of the same data that are viewable online. The zipped archives are organized by type of statistics and by country. In addition, the entire collection (all countries, all statistics) is available for download. See the Zipped Data Download Page.

PC Users

The easiest way to download the text (ASCII) data files is:
  1. Right click on the link to the data file of interest (e.g., 1x1),
  2. Left click on Save Target As (Internet Explorer) or Save Link Target As (Netscape, Mozilla),
  3. Specify the directory (folder) where you want to save the text file (e.g., fltper_1x1.txt), and
  4. Left click on Save.
Alternatively, if you have already opened a data file in your web browser, then:
  1. Right click from anywhere in the data file,
  2. Left click on View Source (Internet Explorer) or Open File in New Window (Netscape), which will open the file in a text editor,
  3. Left click on File on the menu bar,
  4. Left click on Save As
  5. Specify the directory where to save the file, and
  6. Left click on Save.
You may now open the file in a text editor (e.g., Notepad, Wordpad, Emacs), import the data into Excel (see instructions below), or read the data into a statistical package (e.g., SAS, Stata, SPSS, S-plus).

Opening Text Data Files in Excel

To open the data file in Excel:
  1. Left click File on the menu bar,
  2. Left click Open ,
  3. Specify the type of text file (*.prn, *.txt, *.csv ),
  4. Left click on the data file to select it, and
  5. Left click on Open.
  6. The Text Import Wizard should automatically appear. By default, Excel should select the appropriate format, so you may simply left click on Next at each step (i.e., Step 1: fixed width; Step 2: you may change the width of columns if you like or use the default; Step 3: you may change the data format for each column or use the default) and left click on Finish to import the data.
Note: These instructions are for Excel 2002; they may differ for earlier versions of Excel (please consult your manual or on-line help menu under "import data").

Combining several data files into a single long file

Downloading and decompressing zipped data files from the HMD website return numerous folders and files containing various output data (Zipped Collection of HMD Statistics). The folders correspond to the type of output data (e.g. death rates, life tables etc.), to male or female gender, and to six age-by-year data formats (1x1, 1x5, 1x10, 5x1, 5x5, 5x10). Each folder contains dozens of country-populations. For analyses with statistical packages, it would be more practical to operate with a single long data file pooling together many population-specific data files. For transforming numerous data files into one, two simple programs have been developed for: 1) pooling together life tables for many countries and years in a single file and 2) death rates for many countries and years in a single file (MPIDR Technical Report TR-2016-001).

Reading Text Data Files into a Statistical Package

Please consult your statistical package manual or on-line help menu for instructions on importing data in a tab-delimited ASCII (text) format. You may need to delete the first three header lines using a text editor before importing the data (so that the file contains only columns of data).