1. To start adding data to your project, click the Data button in the upper left menu.
2. All of those menu options in that left hand menu are categories of data that you can select. If we were interested in looking at the educational attainment of the people who live in this census tract, we'd click "Education," and all of these options would appear:
3. You can select as many categories of information as you like, and all of your options for data will appear in the column on the right. If you want to look at Educational Data, but only educational data that refers to women, you can select "Female" as well, and the data available to you will change to look like the following:
4. You can always unselect "Female" if you want to go back to looking at all Educational Data, and you can unselect Educational Data if you want to go back to looking at all of the categories of data available to you.
5. To choose the data you're interested in, just click the grey bars that describe the data and they'll be added to your project. For example, if I'm interested in women who have Bachelor's Degrees, I'll scroll through that right column until I see the data I'm looking for. Towards the bottom, we see "# Education Attainment Female, bachelor's Degree" and "% Education Attainment Female, Bachelor's Degree". These will tell you the number of women who live in this census tract with a bachelor's degree and the percentage of people who live in this census tract who are women with a bachelor's degree.
5. When you click on a piece of data, you'll see a check mark next to it, that means that you've added that data to a project. If you click more than one piece of data, you'll notice that only one category will have a checkmark at any given time. Don't worry! You've still added both pieces of data to your project, the check mark just indicates what data is displayed on the map that has appeared behind the data categories.
So when we have "#Education Attainment Female, Bachelor's Degree" selected, our map will look like this:
Before we talk about the map, let's add some more data to our project.
6. You may have noticed there's a category of data called "Health," so let's look at our options there.
7. I'm going to specify that I'm interested in Doctor Visits, and select "# All persons without a usual place of health care," "% All persons without a usual place of health care" ...
8. ... and I'll choose "# Delayed care due to cost" and "% Delayed car due to cost"
9. And you've successfully added six categories of data to your project! In the next few pages, you'll see how to add locations, how to look at and manipulate a map, how to create comparison charts with your data, how to view where your census tract ranks in comparison to the other locations you're interested in, and more!