I compressed my data file and attempeted to download the file into excel, however, was not able to download. What exact steps should I be taking in order to downlowd this data into an exel spreadsheet?
Before submitting your data extract on the “Extract Request” page, click the “Change” button on the “Data Format” option line. This will give you several different data format options, the default being a fixed-width data file. If you select the .csv option, your data extract will be delivered to you as a .csv file and be able to be opened in Excel. We also have an online video tutorial that walks through these steps.
One limitation of Excel to be aware of is the row limit set at 1,048,576 rows. For some IPUMS data files this can be quite restrictive.