How To Use the PLACES Data Portal

What to know

PLACES provides eight datasets for each release in two formats (Open Data and GIS friendly) at county, place, census tract, and ZIP Code Tabulation Area levels. This page explains how to navigate, search, visualize, and export the data, among other functions. It's intended for users who need to explore data in table format, subset/download data based on their interest, and access data via API in program fashion.
Preview image of the PLACES Data Portal page.

Overview

With each release, CDC makes PLACES datasets available in two formats (Open Data and GIS friendly) at four geographic levels. It is intended for users who want to explore detailed data in a table format, review subsets of data, download data based on their interests, and access data via API. This page explains how to use the portal.

PLACES data are available through the following websites:

Quick start Video Guides are also available.

Getting started

Accessing data on the PLACES data portal

To get started, you will need to select a geographic level and data format of interest.

There are two ways to access the current PLACES release data:

The instructions below use county-level data in Open Data format as an example.

  • To get started, click the County link to view the county dataset page.

About Tab

The Dataset page defaults to the About tab, which includes:

  • About this Dataset: General information about the dataset.
  • What's in this Dataset: The number of rows and columns in the dataset.
    • Columns: Descriptions of each field in the dataset.
  • Dataset Changelog: Lists changes made to this dataset.
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Screen view of the PLACES County Data (opendata format) 2024 Release page.
Click the County link above, the county dataset page appears.

The (white) menu bar at top includes 3 tabs (on the left) and 2 buttons (on the right):

Tabs

  • About: Default page when you click a dataset in the portal.
  • Data: Provides table view of the dataset.
  • Related Content: Provides items used this dataset, such as graph, filtered view, and chart.

Buttons

  • Actions: Provides a drop-down menu of options for using the data:
    • Query Data
    • Visualize
    • API
    • Access via OData
    • Share
    • Contact dataset owner
  • Export: You can click this button to export the entire dataset in your format of choice, such as JSON, GeoJSON, and CSV.

Each of these tabs and buttons are reviewed in detail below:

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PLACES Data Portal Actions button and menu, including Query data, visualize, API, Access via oData.
Dataset Actions button and menu.

Data Tab: View data in table

When you click the Data tab on the menu bar, the data displays in a table view.

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Screenshot of PLACES Data Portal data table view.
Click Data tab from the menu bar, the data table view appears.

When you type a key word in the search box, the related estimates will display in the table (e.g. Cancer). You can export this search result to a CSV file or other format of your chose.

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PLACES Data Portal data table view search auto fills table with related estimates (i.e. cancer).
This search box allows you to search the dataset using a key word.

Adjust columns displayed in the table

You can adjust what columns are displayed in the table view by checking or unchecking the column headings.

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Data Set allows user to click on right side of table, column list appears, add/subtract columns.
When you click columns on right side of table, a column list appears.

Action Buttons

Query data

You can filter data by geographic location and/or measures by clicking the Query data option in the Actions drop-down menu.

  • Your query result can be exported and saved online if you have signed up for an account with data.cdc.gov.
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Data view screenshot displays Query filters of data by state (GA) and measure (COPD).
Filter county data by state (GA) and health measure (COPD) in opendata format.

Note: The same approach can be used with the place (filter by state, place, and measures), census tract (filter by state, county, census tract, and measures), and ZCTA (filter by ZCTA and measures) datasets. You can download filtered data or create an account, sign in and save as a view and embed on a website.

For the GIS-friendly format data, each row is one geographic unit (e.g., county, place, census tract, or ZCTA) with all measures.

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Screenshot of GIS-friendly PLACES County data view.
County GIS-friendly dataset data view.

The filter for GIS-friendly format can only be applied to geographic units. For example, download data for:

  • All counties/a county in a state.
  • All places/a place in a state.
  • All census tracts/a tract in a state or a county.
  • A ZCTA or multiple ZCTAs.

Visualize

You can make a chart or a map using the visualize feature.

  • You can select a chart type using the buttons along the top of the screen.
  • Configure it by using options on the left side of the chart.
  • Apply filters to it using the options on the right side of the chart.

Note: Not all chart types can be used for PLACES data.

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Data View, using Action button Visualizations, bar chart of COPD crude prevalence by NE counties.
Configure a bar chart to show COPD crude prevalence by NE counties.

Below is an example of a map created to show crude prevalence by Texas counties.

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Data Portal Actions button map visualization of COPD crude prevalence in Texas by county.
Configure a COPD county map for Texas counties.

Access via OData

To access the data in Excel, Power BI, or Tableau, select Access via oData from the Action drop-down menu.

  • You can copy the oData Endpoint URL to the software to add the dataset as a data source.
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To access the data in oData for Excel, Power BI, Tableau, select Access via oData from Action menu.
Access this dataset via oData to allow you to copy the URL and paste into Excel, Power BI or Tableau as a data source.

Export button

The Export button allows you to save and export your data. Clicking this button will display a pop-up menu with two options:

  • Download file.
  • API endpoint.

Choose one, then select your desired data format from the dropdown menu that appears.

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The Data Portal "Export" window accessed from the "Export" button next to the "Actions" button.
When you click the export button on the primary page view or data view, select the data format, then click download.
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Data Portal Export/Download API endpoint option, showing download of a JSON file.
Export API endpoint option.


Sign Up For An Account:

Signing up for an account in data.cdc.gov allows you to save filtered views and visualizations to embed a view or visualization on your website.

If you don't have an account with CDC:

  • When the Sign In to data.cdc.gov window appears, click Sign in with Tayler Data & Insights ID.
  • On the next screen, click the Sign Up link at the bottom right of the window.
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PLACES Data Portal Sign In screen, with either Tyler Data & Insights ID or with your CDC account.
Sign in to data.cdc.gov

Fill out the form below to create a Tyler Data & Insights ID account.

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Data Portal screen showing form to sign up for a Tyler Data & Insights ID account for data download.
Sign up for a Tyler Technologist account to save your queries and visualization to data.cdc.gov.

Access Data Using SAS, Stata, R, Python, Etc.

The datasets can be accessed using many popular programming languages.

This developer guide provides detailed documentation on the Socrata Open Data API.

  • The code snippets section of the guide is great for learning to work with datasets using code.

More help:

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Code Snippets page has many code language examples for working with datasets using code.
In the Code Snippets section, you can find examples for popular program languages, such as R, SAS, Python.

SAS: https://dev.socrata.com/blog/2015/11/10/analyzing-open-data-with-sas.html

R: https://github.com/Chicago/RSocrata

Python: https://github.com/xmunoz/sodapy

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Content Source:
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion