I've been experimenting with a new ACS Query Builder for the Federal Data Forum. The goal is to make it easier to find and download published American Community Survey data without having to know the right table, variable, or Census API syntax.
A few features:
- Ask for data in plain language. The tool tries to identify the appropriate ACS table, variable, geography, and data release for you to review.
- Build queries manually if you already know what you're looking for.
- Choose among Subject Tables, Detailed Tables, Data Profiles, and Comparison Profiles.
- Run large multi-geography queries, including all U.S. counties, places, PUMAs, congressional districts, or all census tracts in the country. For the national tract option, the tool automatically batches 51 separate Census API calls for the 50 states and DC and combines the results into one download.
- Build time trends and automatically use 1-year or 5-year ACS data where appropriate.
- View results with accompnaying margins of error, download a CSV, and see the underlying Census API URLs used to retrieve the data.
This is a beta release, so I'd like to hear about questions it gets wrong, confusing parts of the interface, or features that would make it more useful.
You'll need a free Census Data API key to use it; there's a link on the page to request one.
Try the ACS Query Builder:
https://federaldataforum.prb.org/acs-query-builder
Please feel free to share it with other ACS users, and reply to this post with any comments or suggestions.
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Mark Mather
Associate VP
PRB
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