I am trying to find the gender, race and education composition of occupations using CPS at a national level because the tables on the Census Bureau website are too generic for the complete list of occupational codes, but I cannot figure out how to do this on the IPUMS data extraction site.
To complete this analysis using IPUMS CPS, you can use either of the following methods: (1) create a data extract, as you have implied, or (2) use the online analysis tool.
This video, although shown using IPUMS USA, will guide you through creating a data extract. First, you will need to register for an IPUMS CPS account. Once your account has been completed and verified, you will want to select the samples that are of interest to you and then add your variables of interest. In order to analyse the data in an extract, you will need a statistical package such as Stata, SPSS, or SAS. Additional videos on how to extract data with specific statistical packages can be found here.
If you do not have access to a statistical package, you can analyze data using the online analysis tool (SDA). To help you through using SDA, we have a video tutorial as well as a written set of instructions.
As for your specific analysis of interest, while you will be able to generate these estimates using the methods described above, the margins of error are going to be large since the sample will not contain many cases that represent all of the possible combinations of occupation, race, sex, age, and education. You can also use the 5-year ACS samples from IPUMS USA, but this may still result in some large errors for rare combinations.