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Welcome to the CDXZipStream January 2011 Newsletter7777
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One-Click
Template for Driving Calculations
We've just developed
a "one-click" Excel template that can help you
quickly and easily calculate driving distance,
time, cost, or total trip duration between long
lists of addresses. It's a free download from our website, along
with our other free templates for geocoding and
route optimization.
Just enter the
addresses in the template, or you can copy and
paste them from another application. Select the
route type (quickest, shortest, or preferred), and
the type of calculation you require: driving
distance (in miles or kilometers), driving time
(in minutes, hours, or days), driving cost, or
total trip duration in hours. Then just
click "Calculate" and the calculations
proceed automatically.
The
driving distance template requires installation of
both CDXZipStream and Microsoft MapPoint; links to
free trials for both are available within the
template itself. Please note that you must
also enable macros in the Excel template for it to
work; detailed instructions for enabling macros
are available on our website. |
Canadian Postal Codes
We
are adding the capability to analyze Canadian
postal codes to all of our products. A
Canadian data feed is now included in our CDXStreamer subscription product,
allowing users to obtain information including
city name, province, latitude and longitude for a
list of postal codes. You can sample this
data for any Canadian postal code on our free demographic data site.
We will also be adding a combined
US/Canadian database to our CDXZipStream product
and expect to have this ready in the first quarter
of 2011. All custom functions such as
CDXFindZip, CDXDistance, and CDXRadius will
support this. You will be able to produce
combined reports showing all postal/zip codes in a
radius or distances between US and Canadian
cities.
The Canadian postal code consists of
6 alphanumeric characters. The first three
characters are referred to as a Forward Sortation
Area (FSA) and the last three designate the Local
Delivery Unit (LDU). In general, the first
character corresponds to a postal district which
in most cases matches a province. The
database for this consists of over 800,000
entries.
Please note, the CDXRouteMP and
CDXLocateMP functions already support Canadian
locations if you are using them with MapPoint
North America. MapPoint 2010 now supports
the full 6 digit postal code while earlier
versions only support the
FSA. |
Socioeconomic Demographics from the
ACS
Since the 2010 Census only
included very basic questions regarding age, race,
and household size, the more interesting
socioeconomic data, covering areas such as income,
housing, education, etc. must now come from the
American Community Survey, or ACS. This
month our ACS data feeds were just updated,
providing the most up-to-date demographics
available (listed here) based on state, county, city
(or "place" in Census jargon), and Core-Based
Statistical Area.
Unfortunately, the
Census Bureau has delayed issuing Census 2010 and
ACS data based on zip code (see our blog posting on this), so
we are.now investigating other ways to provide
detailed demographics for smaller geographies.
Since census tract data are currently available
from the ACS, the best approach is to build a
CDXZipStream function that can determine the
census tract for any address or zip code centroid,
then provide demographics for that particular
tract. Using tract demographics is an
especially good approach as tracts are typically
smaller than zip codes (there are about twice as
many census tracts in the U.S. as zip codes), and
the resulting demographic data are more
descriptive of the immediate
area.
We'll keep you posted
on our work as it
proceeds. |
Data
Updates
We have just completed the annual
updates of the American Community Survey
demographics for states, counties, places
(cities), and Core-Based Statistical
Areas.
CDXZipStream data feeds were updated
as of January 21. There were 829 changes to
the zip code database this month. We can't
overstress the fact that if you rely on the data,
you need to update your database routinely because
of these frequent changes.
If you would
like to update your database, click on the
"License Information and Software Updates" icon on
the CDXZipStream toolbar, and select "Data
Updates" to login to your account. If you've
forgotten your user name or password, please
contact us at support@cdxtech.com.
As
always, we hope you find the information in our
newsletter useful. You can contact us with
your feedback and suggestions by replying to this
email. The
Team at CDX
Technologies
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In This
Issue
One-Click
Template for Driving Calculations
Canadian
Postal Codes
Socioeconomic
Demographics from the ACS
Data
Updates |
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