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US Census data is available at no cost through the US Census Bureau's American FactFinder web site. There, you can view data, create maps or download the data in several file formats.
If you are just interested in census data alone or maps of census data, you don't even need OwlView. The advantage of OwlView is that you can download census data, combine it with your own data and then view spatial trends in your data rather then just census data.
The following three quick start tutorials will show you how to quickly view and download census data. These tutorials demonstrate only a few capabilities of the American FactFinder web site and you should explore other in-depth tutorials found on the AFF web site to understand the full range of what is available.
Quick Start: Finding the Census Tract and Block Number
Quick Start: Viewing Data On a Map
On the American FactFinder web site main page, select the Maps and Geography tab on the left.
Select the Reference Maps link within text near the top of the page.
Enter an address at the bottom of the page and click Go.
The census tract number appears on the map in brown and is a one to four digit number sometimes with a decimal point and two additional digits. The block number appears on the map in yellow and is a four digit number. The first (leftmost) digit of the block number is the block group number.
Zoom out if necessary to see more numbers for the surrounding area by clicking the zoom control numbers on the right.
On the American FactFinder web site main page, select the Data Sets tab on the left.
Select a data set radio button on left and then select the Thematic Maps option on the right.
Select a geography type (for example: Place), a state (for example: Massachusetts), a geographic area (for example: Brookline CDP) and then click Next.
Select a theme (type of data) from the scrolling list and then click Show Result.
Use the popup menu within the map identifying information near the top of the page to redraw the map using another geography type (for example: Census Tract, Block Group or Block).
On the American FactFinder web site main page, select the Data Sets tab on the left.
Select a data set radio button on left and then select the Detailed Tables option on the right.
Select a geography type (for example: Census Tract), a state (for example: Massachusetts), a county (for example: Norfolk County), one or more geographic areas (for example: click Census Tract 4001 and then shift-click Census Tract 4012 to select the range 4001 through 4012 which are all the tracts in Brookline) and then click Add. It is also possible to change the state or county and add more tracts to the list.
Click Next after adding all census tracts.
Select one or more tables (type of data) from the scrolling list and then click Add.
Click Show Result after adding all tables.
Select the Download item from the Print/Download menu in the menu bar near the top of the page.
Select a file format and then click OK.
If you intend to use the downloaded data with OwlView, select database compatible comma delimited (.txt) near the bottom of the choices. In that case, the name of one of the downloaded files will end with _data1.txt.
In column one of that file, remove the leading digits and "US" from each code and the remaining code will be interpreted by OwlView as a place code.
If accessing the file through Excel, a custom format containg one zero for each digit after "US" should be applied to the code column to avoid losing any leading zeros. For example, the format "0000" should be used if the orginal code was "01000US0123."
If opening the file in OwlView as a CSV text file, any commas within numbers must be removed. In addition, the text file should not contain any lines greater the 512 characters in length.
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