ACS Data Users Group

I just spent a couple hours manually stripping all tables that are NOT included in the 2014 5-year release, out of the 2014 table shells file. Here it is!


[Updated on 11/30/2015 5:01 PM]

Hi Glenn, can you explain the problem you're fixing?

Up until last year, the Bureau made available a separate table-shells file for each period, i.e. 1-, 3- and 5-year. Now there's a single file for all 3 (now 2) annual ACS releases.

Some of us use the table-shells file to control processing of the raw data. In my case at least, if the table-shells file contains tables/columns that don't exist in the data, there's a problem.

So, this isn't really a "fix", but a reversion to the earlier table shells format in order to match the data.

Thanks for the explanation. We also need an external file for data processing, but we've used the file templates, which are already available: www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/summary_file/2014/data/2014_5yr_Summary_FileTemplates.zip. My guess/hope is that these files are still specific to the 5-year estimates.

What they're missing is any metadata, so the table-shells file is still really useful for that. Thanks for posting.

And.... Thank YOU for letting me know where the Bureau is now putting data on its FTP site! :) I was looking all over for the 2014 1-year data.