Export Places by ZIP

Suppose you need a list of PLACES, organized by ZIP code, for a five-county area.

Bring the places into the map

Map Menu, Map Layers, All layers tab, Census areas,'09 Places: check it in.

Make 1 big group with all the places in the 5-county area. Call this group "MyLocalPLaces", so you will be able to use it as an overlay layer in GROUP BY OBJECT later on. There will probably be two or three hundred places in the group.

Notice that a lot of the area is not going to be covered by a place. The place area layer does not cover all the land.

Make a group of ZIPS, by Places.

• Change to the ZIP layer -- ZIP centroids.
  
• From the Groups menu choose GROUP BY OBJECT
• Specify overlay objects
• Choose '09 Places as your overlay layer.
• In the right column, "Choose from layer roster", radio "objects in selected groups"
• You will select "MyLocalPlaces" to group by, in order to create a new ZIP group for each place.

Click "Next".

Specify target groups page

Here, you have 3 things to do. * Select the Target layer -- 2010Q2 zip centroids * Under the Groups radio button, choose "Create a new group for each overlay object". Note: there should be as many overlay objects as ZIPs.

• Right above that, notice where it says something like Grouping: Grouping 327. You can either make a note of that grouping name, or click the funny little asterisk picture to the right of it, and name the grouping yourself.

Give the grouping a good name

Now is one of those opportunities, that we don't always get, to make life a little easier for yourself:

Instead of Grouping 329, I would call it "City Grouping of ZIPS". And make sure that you name it in the "grouping name" box at the bottom, and NOT the Name: box at the top, which is just the group name.

Then Click Assign.

Now here, you may notice a little "gotcha" about the idea of zips in places. Some of the ZIPS you have grouped go WAY beyond their place boundaries, like 92278 for example. This probably doesn't matter for what you are doing, but it is inexact. The same thing is true for counties, there is a ZIP is mostly not in LA county in the far northwest of it.

Export the data

Now you have your assignments, and you are on the ZIP layer.

From the Data Menu, choose Export data, choose the ZIP codes you want to export in the usual way, click next to get the Specify Data Variables page, check off the variables you want, and find next to a little green disk pack (the others are purple) something that says Group Assignments (_ZIP102), and cick the little "plus" to open it. You will see 2 data items for you Group Key: City Grouping of ZIPS (if you have named it this) and Group Name: City Grouping of ZIPS. Select them both, just so you can see the difference, click next, click Export.

You can then click the blue-underlined name of the Outputfile to open it in Excel, and scroll down to see that some of the ZIPS are in places, and some are not.