Personal Finances available

[Susi]

Hello all,

We are pleased to announce that the 2008 personal finances data is now
available in the OpenData. As I mentioned earlier, this data has been
entirely restructured internally, but all the tables and fields remain
the same in the OpenData. The files are NOT provided in the CSV
format, however, but are pipe-delimited (ascii 124). A pipe delimits
all text fields; dates and numbers are not delimited. We anticipate
that this will make it substantially easier to load this data into
various database platforms.

One addition has been made to the documentation on page 13 of the
Users Manual: in assigning a value to the AssetTypeCRP field, "P is
used as a placeholder when a company’s status as public or private has
not yet been determined.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions.
Our Personal Finances expert, Dan Auble, is also available to answer
questions. And we'd love to hear about the mashups and analyses that
you undertake with this data (and any of our OpenData sets!).

Susi

[Andy Eggers]

Hi,

Just starting to work with the new personal finance data. Thanks again
for sharing this data.

I wanted to share that the delimitation seems to be a bit inconsistent
on a few columns in PFDtrans.txt. In general the text fields are pipe
delimited and the date and number fields are not, as Susi indicates,
but the delimitation of the Asset4Purchased and Asset4Sold fields is
inconsistent. In particular, it looks like the data was entered as "|
x|" for whichever column gets the "x" and as "" for the other column.
(To be consistent it should be "|x|" and "||".)

For example the last 10 columns of the first two rows of PFDtrans.txt
are:

[...] ,,|x|,| |,08/23/2003,|082303|,|B|,,| |,||,| |
[...] ,|x|,,| |,12/12/2003,|121203|,| |,,| |,||,| |

So, watch out for that!

Andy

[Andy Eggers]

Same seems to be true of "purchased," "sold," and "dupe" columns of
PFDassets.txt.

Andy

[Susi Alger]

Hello Andy,

Thanks so much for the heads up on the issues with the PFDAssets and PFDTrans tables.  I'll take a look and see what I can do about providing a new file by Monday.  While the data itself will not change, the ease of importing the data in these two of the ten tables should improve.

Susi

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[Susi]

Hello All,

The new file is now available, and I did test both the asset and
transactions tables and both imported into MS Access without error and
with no special programming. Hopefully things will go just as
smoothly with your platform. There are still cases of fields with
both || and | | as possible values, but as either can be interpreted
as blank, it shouldn't cause too much pain. I started to take a look
at fixing those, but a couple of quick things I tried weren't
sufficient and it became clear that it was going to take hours to
resolve. Given the minimal impact of having both in the data and the
long list of other things on my plate right now, it didn't seem the
best way for me to spend my time.

Thanks again, Andy, for the quick heads up on the problem.

Susi

On Nov 28, 11:23 am, Susi Alger <susi.al...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Andy,
>
> Thanks so much for the heads up on the issues with the PFDAssets and
> PFDTrans tables.  I'll take a look and see what I can do about providing a
> new file by Monday.  While the data itself will not change, the ease of
> importing the data in these two of the ten tables should improve.
>
> Susi
>

> > opensecrets-open...@googlegroups.com<opensecrets-open-data%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> > .