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Retrieving Basic Information from the U.S. Census

If you just need to know some basic information for one geographic area, then using American FactFinder's FactSheets is your best choice. The data for these pages come from a variety of Census data sets and surveys. Please note that AFF works best with Internet Explorer and you must have your pop-up blocker turned off or at least set to accept pop-ups from the AFF domain. The Census Bureau provides more detailed technical help.

Here are some instructions to help you navigate through AFF's FactSheets; you can click on the L to see a screen shot of the AFF pages (you may need to resize the window to get better resolution).

  1. On American FactFinder's main page, there is a box in which you can enter a city, county or zip code. Simply enter the relevant information in the box and click on the "GO" button. Hint: if you enL

  2. Depending on what you enter, you may be presented with some more choices to further specify your request. L

  3. Once you make your choice, you will be presented with the FactSheet for that area. The FactSheet itself will allow you to obtain even more detailed information by clicking on the various "show more" for detailed information, "map" to create a thematic map of the area, and "brief" to read a short report about that topic (these are usually written at the national level, not city, county, etc.) links. By clicking on the "search by address" link, you can expand the search form.L

  4. Enter a street address into the form, and new links indicating different levels of geography in which that address is found will appear at the top of the table. By clicking these links, the table information will switch to that particular level.L

  5. Creating simple thematic maps of the table information is very easy. Just click on the "map" link for the variable in which you are interested and the basic map will be displayed. Note that thematic maps are not necessarily the exact same variable as the table.L

  6. You can cutomize your map by changing the color scheme, data classes, boundaries, and geographic level displayed.L

  7. When you are done customizing your map, you can print or download it by going to the "Print/Download" link and choosing "Print" or "Download." Print will do exactly that - print the map, title and legend on a printer connected to the computer on which you are working. Choosing "Download" will open another window giving you the option to download the data in table format or downloading the map in PDF format.L
 
 
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