With a little help from a friend

Staying in the Olympic weekend theme... with a little help from a friend you can get the Census data from their recently released beta data API in a format more easily used in Excel.

I found out about the Census Data API and couldn't resist. Is there a map? What do you get? Quickly got an API key and off I went.

Oh... do you know the ANSI code for your state? Mine is 06. That's Ca/CA/California for most.
Wanted to get population by state? that's parameter code P0010001 in the 2010 Census Summary File 1 (SF1) dataset.

Enhancement Request #1 - provide more easily accessible lookup for the various parameters.
Enhancement Request #2 - allow state abbreviations in addition to ANSI codes.

Alright, once you have this plus the key, off you go:
http://api.census.gov/data/2010/sf1?key=______&get=P0010001,NAME&for=state:*

response: a JSON array like this:

[["P0010001","NAME","state"],
["4779736","Alabama","01"],
["710231","Alaska","02"],
["6392017","Arizona","04"],
["2915918","Arkansas","05"],
["37253956","California","06"], 

... 

that's ok if you're a web developer, but I had thought to use this in Excel!

Enhancement Request #3 - support additional common output formats like CSV.

Based on 'stackoverflow convert-json-format-to-csv-format-for-ms-excel' I created a simple 

wrapper for the requests I was sending. The resulting CSV opens nicely in Excel like so:

AHA! From here we're good with the new Esri Maps for Office add-in:

And then shared to ArcGIS Online: 

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