Jonathan,

Have you called your regional Census branch? I am in New Mexico and the Denver Regional team actually held 3 days of training out here for our data users, assisting nearly 100 people. During the trainings FF2 did run into many snags (some of these may have been related to the lab we were working in) but the Census folks were very interested to know what those problems were and encouraged us to submit comments through the website. I am pretty attached to FF1 but I think that when they work through the issues FF2 will probably be a little more intuitive to new users and something the old users are going to have to get used to ;)

One tip we discovered, start your searches using the GEOGRAPHY, as you would in the old system, things seem to work better.

Best wishes,

Kendra

Kendra Watkins
Senior Data Analyst
Mid-Region Council of Governments
809 Copper Ave. NW
Albuquerque, NM 87102
Phone: (505)724-3601
Fax: (505)247-1753
Email: kwatkins@mrcog-nm.gov

From: ctpp-news-bounces@chrispy.net [mailto:ctpp-news-bounces@chrispy.net] On Behalf Of Jonathan Lupton
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 8:45 AM
To: ctpp-news@chrispy.net
Subject: [CTPP] FactFinder2

Is anybody else having trouble using FactFinder2?

My state, Arkansas, is due for Census 2010 figures this week. I have tried to familiarize myself with FactFinder2, but cannot get much out of it.

The actual product DOES NOT work the way the tutorial says it should.

My agency will fall back on FTP downloading as our only source if necessary, of course. I hope we don’t have to switch to FTP for everything!

Our state data center had no help, nor any plans for training seminars, etc., when I called about this matter.

Any tips, thoughts, reflections from other data users?

Jonathan Lupton

Metroplan

Little Rock Arkansas