A look at what to expect from our census tables
As you may already know, Censtats produces data in three formats: XLSX, CSV, and JSON. We chose these three due to their wide transferability to different programs and their simple formats, but beyond that - what is the difference between them exactly? Today, we want to highlight these formats and help explore what goes on when importing one of our tables into whatever program you choose.
XLSX
XLSX stands for Microsoft Excel - yes, this program gets its own file format. The XLSX format provides the most detailed information from our data tables, such as colors and stylized column headers to make for easily readable census data. Despite being named for Microsoft Excel, XLSX can be applied to other programs as well - for example, LibreOffice is a popular and free program available for Mac. Essentially, what Excel can do, LibreOffice can do, and others as well so long as XLSX is accepted.
CSV
CSV stands for comma-separated values, and seems rather self-explanatory. The data is very simple, losing all the formatting found in XLSX and offering an easily importable format for most programs.
One way to note how CSV operates is with the "City" column of a Censtats data table - currently, the cities are broken up by commas, but originally they were separated by semi-colons. What this caused was for each value surrounded by semi-colons to be separated into their own cells in the table, breaking format. This is the sort of issue that may arise when quickly converting a file from one format, like XLSX, to CSV.
JSON
JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. Upon first glance, you might realize that it's not exactly meant to be readable compared to XLSX or CSV; this is because it is designed to be easily parsed by computer programs. JSON, instead of being formatted like a table, is instead purely plain text, but with data organized in certain notation that makes it easily readible and transferable across servers.
As we've stated before, we're always interested in expanding what Censtats can offer, be it in census data or in file formatting. If you have a file format you'd like represented, be sure to let us know!
Header image sourced with permission from Hyperbleh.
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