ACS Data Users Group

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

Not an expert (in ACS or Shap files) I dont understand what your trying to do. If you want data for census tracts its all there. You can get tract info for any table, no need for any shape files. Are you trying to do some map stuff with ACS data? What fields are you interested in. You can get all the data for any field by county easily with an API. Its not finished but take a look at this it will give you API formats and links back to the API pages. https://tomlaheyh.github.io/Census-ACS-5-data/

You can join the GEOIDFQ field from the TIGER/Line shapefile with the GEO_ID field from the ACS table.

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