Hi All,
I am just getting into using ACS data and have a question regarding joining tables in ArcGIS Pro. I would like to join a Census Tract Shapefile with a standalone ACS table. But I can find no common fields for a successful join. I created a new GEOID field in Excel and processed the existing GEOID data into my new field. Do I need to create a new field in the attribute table then manually fill it before I can do a join? My ACS table has 115 tables, one for each county in the state. My Shapefile has 251 rows for the county of interest. That all said, can I create a new Excel sheet with the data from the ACS table and join it with the shapefile? Or, is this even doable? For my project, I need to show these various characteristics at the county Census Tract level. Please advise.
Best Regards,
Mark Anderson
If you are downloading your ACS data from the Census web portal "data.census.gov" - you should use Chrome and download using a ZIP file. This will ensure that your data comes with GEO/FIPS codes…
If you are downloading your ACS data from the Census web portal "data.census.gov" - you should use Chrome and download using a ZIP file. This will ensure that your data comes with GEO/FIPS codes. That should allow you to have the codes to join. If you are using shapefiles (TIGER/line), depending on what you are doing, you could instead download the cartographic boundary files, which use less memory, and join to our data quite easily. You can contact me directly if you need more guidance or help. David Kraiker, Data Dissemination Specialist, david.j.kraiker@census.gov