American Factfinder – New Interface

As of today, the Census Bureau has revised the American Factfinder Interface (at http://factfinder2.census.gov/) once again, and this time it’s a good improvement. Previously users had everything and the kitchen sink thrown at them – now there is a choice of paths to follow that range from novice to advanced:

1. The Community Facts lets you type in the name of a state, county, city, or ZIP Code to get basic profiles from several datasets
2. The Guided Search gives you a basic set of options and a simple path to follow for viewing and downloading comparison tables for the most common census geographies
3. The Advanced Search is essentially the previous Factfinder2, and gives you access to the entire range of census datasets and variables for all geographies
4. The FTP site provides power users with a way of downloading tons of data at once

I’ve updated the PDF tutorials / handouts that I mentioned in my post a few days ago to reflect these changes (they’re in the NYC Data and US Census Data LibGuides).