ACS Data Users Group

Hi,

I need to access ACS 2005 and ACS 3-yr data on the county and place geographic levels. These data sets are not on the data.census.gov website. Does anybody know where I can go to find this data? It was originally available through American Fact Finder.

Thanks,

Jessica

You can get it off the Census FTP site here:
https://www2.census.gov/

NHGIS has 2005 5-year data but I only see 3 year data on NHGIS beginning with 2008-2011 - so if that would help, NHGIS is probably easier to deal with than the raw summary files on FTP.

https://data2.nhgis.org/main

Cool, thanks so much!!

Hi, sorry to ask again. I am not familiar with the format of the FTP data, is there an easy way to view these raw summary files in excel or is there a good resource for explaining how to work with this data for beginners?

There's some documentation on the ACS pages of the Census website here:
www.census.gov/.../summary-file-documentation.html

See if that will get you rolling. There used to be an Excel based user tool that allowed you to import tables but I can't seem to find that. Maybe someone else will know what I'm talking about and where to find that.

You can view the availability of ACS datasets by AFF/API/FTP/data.census.gov at www.census.gov/.../ACS_datasets_migration.xlsx. The 2012 and 2013 ACS 3-year estimates were added to the API today, and we will update the spreadsheet soon to reflect that change.

Hi, thanks! Do you have a link or an explanation of what your definitions of "datasets" are in your excel sheet? For example, what is the difference between the detailed table and the data profile?

You can learn more in the General Data Users Handbook at www.census.gov/.../general.html or the Table IDs Explained page at www.census.gov/.../table-ids-explained.html

Hi, another question. The excel data set migration sheet says that 2005 ACS 1-yr and 2007 ACS 3-yr are available on the API but I cannot find them.

Check out the API Discovery Tool at www.census.gov/.../new-discovery-tool.html