I use the Advanced Search function at this url: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/advanced . The files are formatted differently than once they were.
It is most useful for many of us when the geographies are in rows and the attributes are in columns. This is also a good format for eventual use in GIS. The interface has a transpose function, but that is not always useful due to other formatting issues (e.g., geography names and estimate data do not line up, MOE showing up in file when excluded in the interface, etc). This seems like an obvious oversight, so I am puzzled why the problem exists.
Is it really such a big technological hurdle to set up the files so that less editing is required later? Some complex datasets would be more difficult to format optimally, but this problem holds for the very basic datasets too.
It seems like this a cyclical issue where solutions that were as close to optimal as possible are forgotten and rediscovered periodically. Where's the institutional memory?
Hmm, you're right, they did change the way the data is formatted. But, if you click the "Download Table Data" in the results pane, you can get it formatted the old way