I'm a non-profit researcher and policy analyst and I feel like I'm constantly banging my head against a wall to download ACS data in a usable format. I have decent statistical analysis and data analysis chops but I am not a coder.
For example -- I'm currently trying to download S2701, Selected Characteristics of Health Insurance Coverage in the US. I just want to produce an excel spreadsheet where I can quickly reference the percent of residents in a certain age group who are uninsured, by county. But I cannot figure out how to download the excel data in a way that the spreadsheet is usable. It produces really gnarly tables with tons of merged cells, and it's impossible to use that format of table and then sort the data or use it for a vlookup. I need to pull the 254 counties in my state which is too much to go through manually.
I want to produce a table where I can have the counties in column A and the values in column B. Maybe margin of error in column C. Instead I have the county name every 10th cell down in column A.
Is there a fix that doesn't involve me writing macros or coding to get usable data?
I have three suggestions.
1. For your immediate problem of health insurance info for Texas (the only state with 254 counties) use the SAHIE interactive data tool. That's from a separate Census program…
This link:
...will give you geoids and counties (or whatever your selected geography is) in columns A & B and estimates, MOEs and annotations in the other columns.
Can you get geography level by city (not MSA) using API? If not, can you get city geography using MDAT? Just curious because I need to download all the cities in the state of Florida and only need one variable for an easy formatted download.
You're asking me? I don't know. I don't use the API.