Our textbook provides a walkthrough of finding data on data.census.gov. Once you have customized a table, that table can be downloaded. Data.census.gov provides several ways to do so, and the way in which they function is not entirely clear. Additionally, some features are nonfunctional. What follows is a brief description of how to download the data, as well as a workaround for nonfunctional downloads.
- Download button: The original table is downloaded in CSV format. “Original” means that if you have transposed the table or hidden any of the columns, this will not be reflected in the download. You will get a ZIP file with the table and two supporting files, including table metadata. The main table will have two header rows, meaning one of them will have to be skipped when importing into a database or statistical software.
- Export to Excel/Export to CSV: These are accessed by clicking in any cell and selecting Export Table in the popup menu. Export to Excel is limited to 400 columns. It will preserve table customizations, creating a spreadsheet of a transposed table if you have selected the Transpose Table customization. Export to CSV can create a CSV of more than 400 columns, but will not export a transposed table. Note that both of these options will (stupidly) create exports of the numeric data as text with embedded commas, e.g. “1,234,567”. This is almost never what you actually want.
- Copy and paste table cells: To do this select any table cell, then hit CTL+A for “Select All”. Right click on any cell and choose Copy with headers. Paste this data into a spreadsheet (Calc or Excel). Although the data is copied with commas embedded in the numbers (you can confirm this by pasting to a text editor), Calc and Excel will recognize the data as numbers and strip the commas upon paste.
Of these three methods, by far the most convenient is to use the built in Download functionality, which also has the advantage of downloading the tables with GEOIDs (geographic identifiers). The other methods will not include GEOIDs.