My first Kiplinger project of the new year: “The 12 Best Cities for High-Paying Jobs,” with guest appearances by Trenton, Cedar Rapids and a few other places you might not expect.

It’s probably not evident from the final product, but a huge amount of data goes into these city slideshows — many-thousand-row spreadsheets from the Census Bureau, BLS, etc. I’ve done about a dozen and gotten “really good at spreadsheets,” in the bemused words of my assigning editor. The process intrigues me more and more as I refine it. You start with a mess of statistics and, many formulas and filters later, pull out a concrete list. Voila!

Next step: Learning to scrape from websites and PDFs, so I can expand past released data sets. I’ll refer to ProPublica’s exhaustive guide for that one.