Warning – Techie Post
May 10, 2007 (posted by ElektroMoose)Bill Cooper from FairData2000 just turned me on to some freeware that, at least at first glance (I haven’t gotten around to testing it yet), is pretty amazing. First off, I was always frustrated by the fact that I would need an ArcINFO license to convert TigerLine files into shape files. It turns out that you don’t. TGR2SHP is freeware that allows you to do this.
But wait, there’s more!
Extracting SF1 through SF4 data is painful especially if you have to make sure that the results have unique STFID numbers so that they can be joined to publicly available shape files. Well there is a whole series of freeware from the people who made TGR2SHP that extracts user-selected data from census 2000 zips in dBase format. Take a look. Better yet, there are no duplicate STFID numbers so you can join the dBase files to ESRI’s publicly available shape files. Viva freeware and Viva GIS Tools, Inc.!