Hi, I have ran into an issue when attempting to download and extracting data to Excel. While the initial download goes as expected, when I attempt to decompress the file by clicking “extract all” on the file an error comes up saying "an unexpected error is preventing the archive from being extracted. Is there any way to overcome this?
It sounds like you are running into trouble decompressing your data file. Macs sometimes struggle with the .gz extension of our data files. We recommend using The Unarchiver, a free decompression software for Macs, to decompress your file.
While it sounds like the issue you are running into is related to decompressing the file, I want to note that by default our files are fixed-width text files. To open your data file directly in Excel, you can request a .csv file instead of a fixed-width file. We provide instructions for changing your data file format in this blog post (which also covers decompressing the data).