There are two newsworthy items related to the Census Public Use Microdata Data. 1. The first is the recent release of the PUMS DVD. This DVD includes the entire U.S. dataset for the 1-percent and 5-percent PUMS, and includes the Beyond 20/20 software to produce user-defined cross-tabulations of PUMS data. This software is VERY fast and is excellent for developing basic two-way, three-way, four-way, n-way cross-tabulations of PUMS. (For example, to produce a California tabulation of persons by PUMA of residence by tenure by vehicles available by means of transportation to work took just a few seconds to produce this four-way table....Hours to analyze, just seconds to create!) The DVD contains about 3.9 gigabytes of data and software, including the national set of raw ASCII record data. You can use the Beyond 20/20 to create your own tabulations and export into various database formats, like csv, txt, xls, dbf, wk1, wk2, etc. The DVD costs $70.00, and is available from the Census Bureau at: http://www.census.gov/mp/www/Tempcat/C2KPUMS.html 2. There was a message on the Investigative Reporters & Editors' Census listserv, from Professor Steve Doig of Arizona State University, on some Microsoft Access code that Mr. Dick O'Reilly of the Los Angeles Times is making available. From Prof. Doig: "It's been a while since I put anything new on my "Reporting Census 2000" site. But Dick O'Reilly of the LA Times has gifted us with a PUMS tutorial, complete with import specs and sample data and queries, that he put together for those unfamiliar with the oddities of PUMS." Go to this page, and follow the navigation bar to What's New: http://cronkite.pp.asu.edu/census/ This is an excellent "how-to" Census site, and has some great information for non-journalists, as well. The MS-Access "PUMS Tutorial" was uploaded 2/10/04. (Please don't ask me about MS-Access or how this works. I have Access on my machine, but I use SAS as my workhorse software to process PUMS data....) Hope this helps, Chuck Purvis, MTC ************************************************************** Charles L. Purvis, AICP Principal Transportation Planner/Analyst Metropolitan Transportation Commission 101 Eighth Street Oakland, CA 94607-4700 (510) 464-7731 (office) (510) 464-7848 (fax) www: http://www.mtc.ca.gov/ Census WWW: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/ **************************************************************