1. Starting from the Social Explorer dashboard, click the Explore button under the first set of data for the United States 
2. You should now have a map of population density of the United States by state. Click change data to map a different set of data 
3. A list of topics should appear. Choose your topic of interest, or to follow the example, choose Age. 
4. You should now have a list of specific data sets. The first one that appears in the example is the American Community Survey 2017 5-Year Estimate. Scroll down and choose a data point. In the example, we choose Education > Population 25 Years and Over > Bachelor's Degree or Better. 
5. Once you've selected a data point, close out of the data choice panel. Your map should update. 
6. To view the data by county, select the drop down that says by State and change the Geography Level to County. 
7. Scroll to zoom in 
8. Roll over a county to see data for that county. 

1. By default, Social Explorer shows you all of the available data. To show just the state of Illinois, you'll need to use a mask. 
2. Once you've chosen your data click the button with the three vertical bars in the box where you chose your data. 
3. Choose the option to Mask map data 
4. Make sure your data is set to display by the State level geography. Click on the state of Illinois. This should mask the map to show just the state of Illinois and put the state in a list of selected geographies. 
5. Click the teal Done button. 
6. Change your geography to be at the county level. You should now have a map showing just the state of Illinois with data mapped by county. 

Note: The video shows an example where the geographies were chosen by uploading a list of counties in the state of Illinois, which is another option. 

1. You can customize how your map data is displayed, including changing the cut points to match your assignment requirements. 
2. Click the edit icon in the box with the data key. You can change the type of visualization (if the type matches the data you're using) and the color palette.  
3. Choose Cutpoints to choose the breaks at which your data changes shade for each class of data. 
4. You can set the number of classes as well as the method by which the classes are calculated. 
5. Click the teal Done button.  

Tip: This is a very important part of your assignment. If you use Social Explorer to generate your map and data, be sure to keep track of how you decided to set the cut points so you can explain in your paper. 

1. Once you have chosen your data you can create a table that you can edit in Excel. 
2. Click the button with the three horizontal bars in the box where you chose your data and choose the option to Create report 
3. Choose to Create report from Current table selection (instead of topic, which is the default). This will create the table from the data you have just mapped.  
4. Choose the geographies you want in the report by either clicking on the map or (as is shown in the video), upload a list of geographies.
5. Click the teal Create button. 
6. A new window should open showing your data as a table. Go to the Excel tab to download the data in Excel format. You'll mostly likely want the Excel 2007 .xlsx version. The Excel file should download and give you a file you can open and manipulate.