I am hoping you could help me find some information. I am trying to pull census data such as (age median, race, sex, weather) however I want it in a excel spreadsheet type format. I am unsure if API and census data can be formed to create something, if there is something already out there to do this, or if there is somewhere I can get this raw data. I am trying to find this data for various cities and states.

Thank you


The Census Bureau offered a tool for exactly this purpose, but it was discontinued as of last fall's data release. (See p. 3 of the Users Guide PDF)

Your reference to "API" is unclear. Are you a programmer who wants to automate the retrieval of data in Excel format? If that was a more casual use of the word, then you can use the American Fact Finder (which doesn't have an API) to download Excel spreadsheets for various Census data.

You can also get current ACS data in Excel from a project I work on, Census Reporter, although right now there's an annoying warning that pops up when you open the Excel files in some cases. (The data is fine.) We have an API but it does not return the data in Excel format.


The Census Bureau has lots of data sets that are accessible through APIs. If you know how to write VBA code, you can access this data directly in Excel. You would need a json parser for VBA (simply googling VBA json parser will find you a few options), but once parsed, the data is pretty easy to work with.

If you're not a developer (and possibly even if you are, but don't need a lot of customization), I'd recommend trying the St. Louis Federal Reserve's FRED Excel add-in. It's a pretty easy to use GUI that will pull in government economic data, including Census data.


To add to these responses, Quandl has a free database called US Census Bureau. Quandl has a powerful API and lets you download data in any format you want, including Excel. See the database here: https://www.quandl.com/data/USCENSUS Hope this helps!

[Disclosure: I work for Quandl]


If you're still looking, try OneGuyOnTheInternet.com (my site). Can't help you with the weather, but you can create a .csv file for a spreadsheet that will slice-and-dice data any way you can imagine (including data items that are not explicitly stored in the data, but are derivable), within the limits of the 2009-2013 ACS file.

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