How can we make a map with MapPoint and the Census Bureau?
Okay, I’ve just downloaded local Census track boundaries for Census 2000 – you can get them by county. You can download a whole state at once, but you get a different shapefile for each county. You can also get census block level data and boundary files. (I don’t remember which is the bigger, tract or block). Looking at the table for the SHP file, it has a field called STFID which should match a field in the census data called GeoID_2. You’ll have to do a join, and export it as a new SHP file, etc, but the whole process takes about 10 minutes. It looks like the file also comes without it’s projection system defines, but it’s actually GCS North American Datum 1983 – you can just tell the file what it is suposed to be in ArcGIS. There is a tutorial on how to do this HERE. I’m not logged in as an ArcGI
