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Mapping Your Own Tract Data
Many users have already remarked that they need an easy way to map their own tract data in BusinessMAP FSE. To facilitate this, we are providing a US 2000 Census Tracts Centroid File that users can match to their own tract-based files, bring over the latitude and longitude of the tract centroids in this file to their own tract-based file, and open up the result in BusinessMAP FSE and color code it. Please keep in mind that this file represents only tracts in the 50 states, in order to limit the number of records to a total that Excel can recognize.
And, since almost everyone who asked about this is using Excel to manage their data, here's a tutorial about how to do this. It features a little shareware program called DigDB that you will first need to download, install, and otherwise be responsible for yourself (including licensing). And you'll also need to prepare your spreadsheet first, so that there is one line per tract, no totals or extraneous data, and so each column has a dbase compatible header of no more than 10 characters. You may also need to re-format your tract identifier (the full Tract FIPS Code) so that it matches the Census 2000 convention (no decimal points).