Gothos

In addition to providing the NYC Geodatabase as a resource, I also wanted to use it to generate reports and build applications. None of the open source SQLite GUIs that I’m familiar with have built in report generating capabilities, so I thought I could use Python to connect to the database and generate them. I have some grand ambitions here, but decided to start out small.

Python has a built-in module, sqlite3, that you can use to work with SQLite databases. This is pretty well documented – do a search and you’ll find a ton of brief tutorials. Take a look at this great post for a comprehensive intro.

For generating reports I gave prettytable a shot: it lets you create nice looking ASCII text tables that you can copy and paste from the prompt or export out to a file. The tutorial for the module was pretty clear and covers the basics quite nicely. In the examples he directly embeds the data in the script and generates the table from it, which makes the tutorial readily understandable. For my purposes I wanted to pull data out of a SQLite database and into a formatted table, so that’s what I’ll demonstrate here.

Initially I had some trouble getting the module to load, primarily (I think) because I’m using Python 3.x and the setup file for the module was written for Python 2.x; the utility you use for importing 3rd party modules has changed between versions. I’m certainly no Python expert, so instead of figuring it out I just downloaded the module, dumped it into the site-packages folder (as suggested in the prettytable installation instructions under “The Harder Way” – but it wasn’t hard at all) and unzipped it. In my script I couldn’t get the simple “import prettytable” to work without throwing an error, but when I added the name of the specific function “import PrettyTable from prettytable” it worked. Your mileage may vary.

So here was my first go at it. I created a test database and loaded a table of population estimates from the US Census Bureau into it (you can download it if you want to experiment):

from prettytable import PrettyTable
import sqlite3

conn = sqlite3.connect('pop_test.sqlite')
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('SELECT State, Name, ESTIMATESBASE2010 AS Est2010 FROM pop_est WHERE region="1" ORDER BY Name')

col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
rows = curs.fetchall()

x = PrettyTable(col_names)
x.align[col_names[1]] = "l" 
x.align[col_names[2]] = "r" 
x.padding_width = 1    
for row in rows:
    x.add_row(row)

print (x)
tabstring = x.get_string()

output=open("export.txt","w")
output.write("Population Data"+"\n")
output.write(tabstring)
output.close()

conn.close()

The first piece is the standard SQLite piece – connect, activate a cursor, and execute a SQL statement. Here I’m grabbing three columns from the table for records that represent Northeastern states (Region 1). I read in the names of the columns from the first row into the col_names list, and I grab everything else and dump them into rows, a list that contains a tuple for each record:

>>> col_names
['State', 'Name', 'Est2010']
>>> rows
[('09', 'Connecticut', 3574097), ('23', 'Maine', 1328361), ('25', 'Massachusetts', 6547629),
 ('33', 'New Hampshire', 1316469), ('34', 'New Jersey', 8791898), ('36', 'New York', 19378104),
 ('42', 'Pennsylvania', 12702379), ('44', 'Rhode Island', 1052567), ('50', 'Vermont', 625741)]
>>> 

The second piece will make sense after you have a quick look at the prettytable tutorial. Here I grab the list of columns names and specify how cells for the columns should be aligned (default is center) and padded (default is one space). Then I add each row from the nested list of tuples to the table, row by row. There are two outputs: print directly to the screen, and dump the whole table into a string. That string can then be dumped into a text file, along with a title. Here’s the screen output:

+-------+---------------+----------+
| State | Name          |  Est2010 |
+-------+---------------+----------+
|   09  | Connecticut   |  3574097 |
|   23  | Maine         |  1328361 |
|   25  | Massachusetts |  6547629 |
|   33  | New Hampshire |  1316469 |
|   34  | New Jersey    |  8791898 |
|   36  | New York      | 19378104 |
|   42  | Pennsylvania  | 12702379 |
|   44  | Rhode Island  |  1052567 |
|   50  | Vermont       |   625741 |
+-------+---------------+----------+

The one hangup I had was the formatting for the numbers: I really want some commas in there since the values are so large. I couldn’t figure out how to do this using the approach above – I’m writing all the rows in one swoop, and couldn’t step in and and format the last value for each row.

Unless – instead of constructing the table by rows, I construct it by columns. Here’s my second go at it:

from prettytable import PrettyTable
import sqlite3

conn = sqlite3.connect('pop_test.sqlite')
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('SELECT State, Name, ESTIMATESBASE2010 AS Est2010 FROM pop_est WHERE region="1" ORDER BY Name')

col_names = [cn[0] for cn in curs.description]
rows = curs.fetchall()

y=PrettyTable()
y.padding_width = 1
y.add_column(col_names[0],[row[0] for row in rows])
y.add_column(col_names[1],[row[1] for row in rows])
y.add_column(col_names[2],[format(row[2],',d') for row in rows])
y.align[col_names[1]]="l"
y.align[col_names[2]]="r"

print(y)
tabstring = y.get_string()

output=open("export.txt","w")
output.write("Population Data"+"\n")
output.write(tabstring)
output.close()

conn.close()

To add by column, you don’t provide any arguments to the PrettyTable function. You just add the columns one by one: here I call the appropriate values using the index, first for the column name and then for all of the values from the rows that are in the same position. For the last value (the population estimate) I use format to display the value like a decimal number (this works in Python 3.1+ – for earlier versions there’s a similar command – see this post for details). I tried this in my first example but I couldn’t get the format to stick, or got an error. Since I’m specifically calling these row values and then writing them I was able to get it to work in this second example. In this version the alignment specifications have to come last. Here’s the result:

+-------+---------------+------------+
| State | Name          |    Est2010 |
+-------+---------------+------------+
|   09  | Connecticut   |  3,574,097 |
|   23  | Maine         |  1,328,361 |
|   25  | Massachusetts |  6,547,629 |
|   33  | New Hampshire |  1,316,469 |
|   34  | New Jersey    |  8,791,898 |
|   36  | New York      | 19,378,104 |
|   42  | Pennsylvania  | 12,702,379 |
|   44  | Rhode Island  |  1,052,567 |
|   50  | Vermont       |    625,741 |
+-------+---------------+------------+

prettytable gives you a few other options, like the ability to sort records by a certain column or to return only the first “n” records from a table. In this example, since we’re pulling the data from a database we could (and did) specify sorting and other constraints in the SQL statement instead. prettytable also gives you the option of exporting the table as HTML, which can certainly come in handy.

In building the Spatialite geodatabase (see previous post), one of the fundamental things I learned was how to manage table creation and alteration in SQLite, which was quite different from my previous experience working with MS Access and ArcGIS.

In SQLite, the ALTER TABLE statement is limited to changing the name of a table or adding new columns. If you want to make any other changes, the process is: create a new, blank table that’s structured the way you want, and then write an INSERT statement to copy the data you want from the existing table into the new table. So if you have a table that has a bunch of columns you want to drop or change, create a new table that has your desired structure, then insert what you want into that new table. The same thing goes for primary keys or other constraints. If your existing table doesn’t have a specified key you can’t alter it by specifying one: create a new table that does, then copy your data over.

Let’s say we have this table (de_data) with basic population data for Delaware’s three counties:

USPS	GEOID	NAME			POP10	HU10	ALAND_SQMI	AWATER_SQMI
DE	10001	Kent County		162310	65338	586.179		212.152
DE	10003	New Castle County	538479	217511	426.286		67.717
DE	10005	Sussex County		197145	123036	936.079		260.312

And let’s say that we want to change some of the column names, drop the field for housing units, and specify our data types and GEOID as our key. First, create the table:

CREATE TABLE de_pop (STATE TEXT, GEOID TEXT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
COUNTY TEXT, POP10 INTEGER, ALAND REAL, AWATER REAL)

GEOID is the FIPS/ANSI code that uniquely identifies each state. Since these codes may have leading zeros (the codes for all states from AL through CT do), we designate it as text.

Second, insert the data we want from the existing table:

INSERT INTO de_pop (STATE, GEOID, COUNTY, POP10, ALAND, AWATER)
SELECT USPS, GEOID, NAME, POP10, ALAND_SQMI, AWATER_SQMI
FROM de_data

Order here matters – it’s going to insert columns from the original table into the new one in sequence: USPS into STATE, GEOID into GEOID, etc. Sometimes it’s possible to use an * as a shortcut to insert and copy everything, instead of listing every field, if both tables contain the same number of columns and they’re in the right order. But this is always a bit risky.

Lastly, if we don’t need that original table we could delete it:

DROP TABLE de_data

SELECT * FROM de_pop

STATE	GEOID	COUNTY			POP10	ALAND	AWATER
DE	10001	Kent County		162310	586.179	212.152
DE	10003	New Castle County	538479	426.286	67.717
DE	10005	Sussex County		197145	936.079	260.312

The process is similar if we want to take a query or view and turn it into a permanent table. SQLite does support CREATE TABLE AS, followed by a select query, so you can create a table out of a query. However – this is usually NOT the best course of action. If you do this, you won’t be able to specify a primary key for the new table (you really never want a table that lacks a key). Furthermore, if you create a new, calculated field you won’t be able to specify a type for it. This is particularly a problem if you’re working in Spatialite and want to create a spatial view or table that you want to join to some features and map in QGIS. If no type is specified, QGIS won’t know how to handle that new field, and it will be unviewable.

So, we take the same approach as before. Let’s say we want to create a table with population density as a calculated field. First, create the table:

CREATE TABLE de_popdens (STATE TEXT, GEOID TEXT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
COUNTY TEXT, POP10 INTEGER, ALAND REAL, AWATER REAL, POPDENS REAL)

Then we write our insert statement, and in the insert we create the calculated field:

INSERT INTO de_popdens (STATE, GEOID, COUNTY, POP10, ALAND, AWATER, POPDENS)
SELECT STATE, GEOID, COUNTY, POP10, ALAND, AWATER, (ROUND(POP10/ALAND),1)
FROM de_pop

SELECT * FROM de_density:

STATE	GEOID	COUNTY			POP10	ALAND	AWATER	POPDENS
DE	10001	Kent County		162310	586.179	212.152	276.9
DE	10003	New Castle County	538479	426.286	67.717	1263.2
DE	10005	Sussex County		197145	936.079	260.312	210.6

This gives us a new table with density properly typed. Once again, this is only necessary if you want the calculated field to be permanent and function with other objects in the database, and particularly if you want to join this table to a geodatabase feature or shapefile to map the attributes. If you simply want the new field to answer a specific question or to export the data to output, you can just do a SELECT query and save it as a view.

I also had to do this procedure for every table and shapefile that I imported to the geodatabase. In the Spatialite GUI you don’t have the option to specify a primary key or data types for columns when you do an import; for the latter it takes its best guess. So to get it well-structured, I imported (or created a virtual link), created a new table, inserted the data over, then deleted the original table or severed the link. If it was a shapefile I went through the extra step of activating the geometry (check out the Spatialite Cookbook or the tutorial I wrote for the NYC geodatabase for details).

Since I was dealing with some enormous tables with hundreds of columns, I used some trickery to avoid typing all the statements by hand. If the data was small enough and came from a spreadsheet, I used a series of concatenate formulas to build the CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements by copying the field names and stringing them together with type names and necessary syntax, so I could just copy and paste a statement into the SQL dialog box. For larger datasets I used Python to do the processing, and had Python grab field names and write statements that I could copy and paste.

The import issue was particular to the Spatialite GUI, and not SQLite in general. If you’re dealing with just data tables and use the SQLite Manager (Firefox plugin), it asks you to specify column names, keys and constraints, and types for the columns you’re importing. It does the latter by having you select from a dropdown box for each column – this works fine if you have 10 or 20 columns, but it’s rather tedious if you have hundreds. The Manager also gives you the ability to alter additional elements of the table, like column names, by essentially performing the same operations (create table, insert records, drop table) behind the scenes while holding things temporarily in memory. It prefaces this with a warning message that this operation is not part of the standard SQLite commands, and there’s a chance something could go awry.

I had a request recently for population centers (aka population centroids) for all the counties in the US. The Census provides the 2010 centroids in state level files and in one national file for download, but the 2000 centroids were provided in HTML tables on individual web pages for each state. Rather than doing the tedious work of copying and pasting 51 web pages into a spreadsheet, I figured this was my chance to learn how to do some screen scraping with Python. I’m certainly no programmer, but based on what I’ve learned (I took a three day workshop a couple years ago) and by consulting books and crawling the web for answers when I get stuck, I’ve been able to write some decent scripts for processing data.

For screen scraping there’s a must-have module called Beautiful Soup which easily let’s you parse web pages, well or ill-formed. After reading the Beautiful Soup Quickstart and some nice advice I found on a post on Stack Overflow, I was able to build a script that looped through each of the state web pages, scraped the data from the tables, and dumped it into a delimited text file. Here’s the code:

## Frank Donnelly Feb 29, 2012
## Scrapes 2000 centers of population for counties from individual state web pages
## and saves in one national-level text file.

from urllib.request import urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

output_file=open('CenPop2000_Mean_CO.txt','a')
header=['STATEFP','COUNTYFP','COUNAME','STNAME','POPULATION','LATITUDE','LONGITUDE']
output_file.writelines(",".join(header)+"\n")

url='http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cenpop/county/coucntr%s.html'

fips=['01','02','04','05','06','08','09','10',
'11','12','13','15','16','17','18','19','20',
'21','22','23','24','25','26','27','28','29','30',
'31','32','33','34','35','36','37','38','39','40',
'41','42','44','45','46','47','48','49','50',
'51','53','54','55','56']

for i in fips:
  soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen(url %i).read())
  titleTag = soup.html.head.title
  list=titleTag.string.split()
  name=(list[4:])
  state=' '.join(name)  
 
  for row in soup('table')[1].tbody('tr'):
    tds = row('td')
    line=tds[0].string, tds[1].string, tds[2].string, state, 
    tds[3].string.replace(',',''), tds[4].string, tds[5].string

    output_file.writelines(",".join(line)+"\n")     

output_file.close()

After installing the modules step 1 is to import them into the script. I initially got a little stuck here, because there are also some standard modules for working with urls (urllib and urlib2) that I’ve seen in books and other examples that weren’t working for me. I discovered that since I’m using Python 3.x and not the 2.x series, something had changed recently and I had to change how I was referencing urllib.

With that out of the way I created a a text file, a list with the column headings I want, and then wrote those column headings to my file.

Next I read in the url. Since the Census uses a static URL that varies for each state by FIPS code, I was able to assign the URL to a variable and inserted the % symbol to substitute where the FIPS code goes. I created a list of all the FIPS codes, and then I run through a loop – for every FIPS code in the list I pass that code into the url where the % place holder is, and process that page.

The first bit of info I need to grab is the name of the state, which doesn’t appear in the table. I grab the title tag from the page and save it as a list, and then grab everything from the fourth element (fifth word) to the end of the list to capture the state name, and then collapse those list elements back into one string (have to do this for states that have multiple words – New, North, South, etc.).

So we go from the HTML Title tag:

County Population Centroids for New York

To a list with elements 0 to 5:

list=["County", "Population", "Centroids", "for", "New", "York"]

To a shorter list with elements 4 to end:

name=["New","York"]

To a string:

state=”New York”

But the primary goal here is to grab everything in the table. So we identify the table in the HTML that we want – the first table in those pages [0] is just an empty frame and the second one [1] is the one with the data. For every row (tr) in the table we can reference and grab each cell (td), and string those cells together as a line by referencing them in the list. As I string these together I also insert the state name so that it appears on every line, and for the third list element (total population in 2000) I strip out any commas (numbers in the HTML table included commas, a major no-no that leads to headaches in a csv file). After we grab that line we dump it into the output file, with each value separated by a comma and each record on it’s own line (using the new line character). Once we’ve looped through each table on each page for each state, we close the file.

There are a few variations I could have tried; I could have read the FIPS codes in from a table rather than inserting them into the script, but I preferred to keep everything together. I could have read the state names in as a list, or coupled them with the codes in a dictionary. This would have been less risky then relying on the state name in the title tag, but since the pages were well-formed and I wanted to experiment a little I went the title tag route. Instead of typing the codes in by hand I used Excel trickery to concatenate commas to the end of each code, and then concatenated all the values together in one cell so I could copy and paste the list into the script.

You can go here to see an individual state page and source, and here to see what the final output looks like. Or if you’re just looking for a national level file of 2000 population centroids for counties that you can download, look no further!

I was working on a project where I had downloaded 51 shapefiles (state-based census tract files) from the Census Generalized Cartographic Boundary Files. Each file lacked a projection .prj file, so I had to define each one as NAD83. Not wanting to do this one at a time, I used the GDAL / OGR tools and a bash script to process them all in a batch. I wrote a little script in a text file and then pasted it in the command line:

#!/bin/bash
for i in $(ls *.shp); do
ogr2ogr -f “ESRI Shapefile” -a_srs “EPSG:4269″ ./nad83 $i
done

It iterates through a list of all the shapefiles in a directory, uses OGR to define them as NAD83, then writes them to a new subdirectory called NAD83.

After searching through the web for some guidance on this, I later realized that there was a nice, succinct example of this in a book that I had (yeah – remember books? They’re still great!)

#!/bin/bash
# from Sherman (2008) Desktop GIS Mapping the Planet With Open Source Tools pp 243-44

for shp in *.shp
do
echo “Processing $shp”
ogr2ogr -f “ESRI Shapefile” -t_srs EPSG:4326 geo/$shp $shp
done

This does the same thing, difference here is that it prints a message to the command line for each file that’s processed and uses the -t_srs switch (transform projection) rather than the -a_srs (assign an output projection), which in this case seems to do the same thing. Of course you could tweak this a little to transform projections from one system to another as well.

This is fine and good if you’re using Linux and can use bash (go here for more info about bash). If you’re using Windows, you can do this if you’re using a Linux / UNIX terminal emulator like MSYS; otherwise you can use the DOS Command Prompt and write a batch (.bat) file to do this instead – the post on this forum is the first thing I found in my quest to figure all of this out.

DBF files are the other thorny issue that comes up when I’m teaching the Intro to GIS workshops with QGIS – specifically how do you create and edit them? Doing that has been pretty inconvenient in the Windows world since they were deprecated in Excel 2007. You can download plugins or basic stand-alone software to do the job. Since I’m a Linux user I have the Open Office suite by default, and I can easily work with DBFs in Calc. That’s an option for Windows and Mac users too, but it’s kind of a drag to download an entire office suite just for working with DBFs (assuming most folks are use MS Office).

Another possibility is to dump DBF all together; even though the join table option in the fTools menu in QGIS only presents you the option of joining shapfiles or DBF, it turns out if you choose the DBF radio button option you can actually point to DBFs OR CSV files when you’re browsing to point to your data table. The join proceeds the same way, and you get a new shapefile with the data from the CSV joined to it. CSVs can be easily created from any spreadsheet, text editor, or database program in any operating system, so you can prep your attribute data in your program of choice before exporting to CSV and importing to GIS.

The problem with this approach is that all of the fields from the CSV file are automatically saved as text or strings when they’re appended to the shapefile. This means that any numeric data you have can’t be treated numerically; you can’t perform calculations or classify data as value ranges for mapping. You can go into the attribute table, enter the edit mode, and use the field calculator to create new fields where you convert the values to integers, but this adds a bunch of duplicate fields and is rather messy. You can’t delete columns from shapefiles within QGIS; you have to edit the attributes outside the software to remove extra columns.

Here’s an easy work around: you can create a CSVT file to go along with your CSV file. Open a text editor like Notepad or gedit and create a one line file where you specify the data type for each of the fields in your CSV file. Save the CSVT with the SAME NAME as your CSV file. Now when you go to join your CSV to your shapefile in QGIS, it will read the CSVT and save all of your fields properly in the new shapefile.

So for a CSV file like this with six fields:

CODE, ST, ID_NAICS51, EMP_51, ID_TOTAL, TOTAL_EMP
01, AL, ENU0100010551, 27013, ENU0100010510, 1570188
02, AK, ENU0200010551, 6988, ENU0200010510, 237708
04, AZ, ENU 0400010551, 41833, ENU0400010510, 2174919 …

You’d create a CSVT file like this:

“String”, “String”, “String”, “Integer”, “String”, “Integer”

So the 4th and 6th fields that have numeric values are saved as integers. There are a few other field types you can use, like Real for decimal numbers and some Date / Time options, and you can specify length and precision – see this post for details.

Using shapefiles, CSVs, and CSVTs are fine for small to medium projects and for the introductory workshops I’m teaching; geodatabases are another option and are certainly better for medium to large projects, but introducing them in my intro workshop is a little too much.

(NOTE – in QGIS 1.7 the join tool has been dropped from the ftools menu. To join a csv or dbf in 1.7+, you have to add your data table as a vector to your map, and then use the join tab within the properties menu of the feature you want to join it to. See this post for details.)

This isn’t a geospatial issue per say, but I thought it would be useful to share. I have a spreadsheet where I’m tracking course evaluation responses for the GIS workshops I’m teaching. I have to report the total number of responses, the mean, and standard deviation for each question. The worksheet I designed tracks aggregate responses; the total number of people who responded to each question in each category, on a scale of 5 (strongly agree) to 1 (strongly disagree). For example:

The problem I had was that Excel’s standard deviation formula doesn’t work for summaries – you need to give the formula individual responses or raw scores for arguments. In other words:

So I was fixated on trying to find a formula, through the help and by searching the forums, where somehow I could calculate standard deviation using summaries or aggregates. It finally dawned on me (duh) that I could plug in the standard deviation formula myself and modify it.

To calculate the standard deviation for an entire population you compute the difference of each data point from the mean and square each result. Then you calculate the average of all these values and take the square root.

So for each question I subtract the mean score for that question from the score category for that question, square it, and then multiply the result by the number of people who answered in that category. So if 10 people strongly agreed with the question and strongly agreed is associated with a score of 5, I subtract the average score (4.71) from 5, square the result, and multiply it by 10 (since ten people responded that they strongly agreed).

((score value – mean score)^2)*respondents

I perform the same operation for each category. So if 4 people said they agreed with a question and agreed is a value of 4, subtract 4.71 from 4, square it, and multiply by 4. After I do this this for each category, I sum the values for each one and take the square root of the whole thing.

SQRT ((((score5 – mean score)^2)*respondents)+(((score4 – mean score)^2)*respondents))

SQRT ((((5-4.71)^2)*10)+(((4-4.71)^2)*4))

For my spreadsheet the formula is repeated for each of the 5 possible scores, references are used to pull in the mean and respondent values from other cells, and I round the entire result to 1 decimal place. The number of parens makes it a little confusing; I’ve inserted a color-coded image below so it’s a little clearer.

=ROUND((SQRT(((((5-H9)^2)*B9)+(((4-H9)^2)*C9)+(((3-H9)^2)*D9)+(((2-H9)^2)*E9)+(((1-H9)^2)*F9))/G9)),1)

Given all that can go wrong with one misplaced parens, I tested this by inputting some raw scores by hand and running the STDEVPA formula to verify that I get the same result.

I got back from leave a couple week ago, and spent part of it at a Python boot camp. I’ve gotten tired of hacking away at data in spreadsheets and read in several places that Python is a good language to learn for beginning programmers – it’s also open source, flexible, and is used by many in the GIS community for processing data and building plugins and software (the instructor for the camp, Chris Calloway, pointed me to this presentation on Python scripting techniques for ArcGIS).

The workshop was a three-day event hosted at Penn State by the Triangle Zope and Python Users Group (TriZPUG). It was geared towards beginners and non-programmers (although many of my fellow classmates were IT and systems people) and provided a pretty thorough review of all of the elements of the language – now it’s up to me to tie it all together! The price was extremely reasonable (only $300 for a 3 day class!) and I’d certainly recommend it if there’s a camp in your area; although I would also recommend reading a book or taking a tutorial to familiarize yourself with the basics BEFORE attending the class; I did, and as a result I think I got more out of it than I would have had going in cold.

The next PyCamp is being held in LA in a few days, and the following one will be in Toronto from Aug 30th to Sept 3rd (although this isn’t posted on the website yet); the normal workshop is a five day affair, the one I attended was a mini 3 day version which suited my needs pretty well.

There are tons of Python tutorials on the web and Python’s site is pretty definitive. If you’re looking for a book, I’d recommend Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python. Unlike the “Learn Language X” books, this one introduces you to general theory and practice in programming, and the authors illustrate the applications with practical examples using Python – it’s been immensely helpful to me. Now that I’m around the initial learning curve, I’ve been relying more on Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional, which is better as a reference book and good for illustrating many of the uses for individual objects, methods, etc (which I had a hard time grasping before I covered the basics of programming).

I’ve been preparing a GIS workshop for the New York Census Research Data Center’s 2nd Annual Workshop series, and have dug up some useful tips as I’ve assembled my materials. Here’s one of them:

I have a data table from the Census Bureau’s 2006 Annual Community Survey (ACS) in Excel which contains some data for Metropolitan and Micropolitan Areas. Now, I have a shapefile of Metropolitan Areas that I would like to join this data table to, but I would like to get rid of the records for the Micropolitan Areas in the data table. Unfortunately, the data table does not have a field that indicates whether an area is a Metro or Micro. Instead, this information is embedded in the name field, like “Akron, OH Metro Area” which means there is no way to sort the table to weed out the Micro Areas.

COUNTIF function to the rescue! I inserted a new column and typed in the formula:

=COUNTIF(D3, “*Metro*”)

If the formula sees the word Metro anywhere in the GEO_NAME, it counts it as a one in the new column, otherwise it counts it as zero (by default, the zeros will be the Micro areas). Copied and pasted the formula all the way down, then copied and pasted the formula column over top of itself using Paste Special (to replace the formulas with the actual values), and voila! Sorted by this column, and deleted all the records with a zero in the field (the Micro areas).

I’ve done something like this before in Microsoft Access using LIKE, but Excel doesn’t include this function. I knew about COUNTIF but didn’t connect the dots. I discovered I could apply it after stumbling across this useful post at Daily Dose of Excel.

Lastly, before you can bring this table into GIS, you have to delete that second header row (you can only have one column heading – the rest of the rows are assumed to be data). While the codes in the first row are cryptic, they are concise. The headings in the second row are too long and contain spaces, which will cause problems when you import the table into GIS.

NOTE – If you’re using Open Office’s Calc instead of Excel, and you have enabled regular expressions under the Tools – Options – OpenOffice.org Calc – Calculate menu, the same function would look like this:

=COUNTIF(D3;”.*Metro.*”)