Thursday, December 06, 2012

Easy Stats

Today was a big day for the Census Bureau. The five-year estimates from the American Community Survey were released for  the third time since the survey's beginning. These detailed statistics from 2007-2011 for 700,000 communities across the country are the replacement for the census long form, which was discontinued in 2000. Rather than getting demographic and economic statistics only once a decade, we now get them every five years. Progress!

There are three different ways to access these very local numbers. The hard way is to go to the Census Bureau's American Factfinder site and compile your data. An easier route is to go to the Census Bureau's QuickFacts site, select your geography (as small as incorporated places with 5,000 people), and get a summary profile of the most popular statistics. The third way is to go to the Census Bureau's Easy Stats site, choose a table from the topics (financial, jobs, housing, people, and education) and select a geography (state, county, or place) and generate a table that can be downloaded in Excel. Have fun!

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