Locating the European City Statistics database
Once the web page has been opened users will see a “Data Navigation Tree”. Within the first section entitled “Database by themes” there is a sub-heading called “General and regional statistics”; once the square next to this sub-heading is selected further sub-headings appear. This time the square next to the “Urban Audit” sub-heading should be selected, once this is done the sub-headings appear for the three geographical levels used within the project (cities, greater cities, and functional urban areas (FUAs)). For this example, the square adjacent to “Cities and greater cities” should be selected; the overarching variable categories then appear.
Selecting data
Data can be selected by clicking on the data explorer icon (magnifying glass over a table); the data explorer window will then open. For this example, the “Population on the 1 January by age groups and sex - cities and greater cities (urb_cpop1)” dataset will be used for the UK for 2015.
After clicking on this a new window will appear showing the data explorer. Above the table in the data explorer window there are three boxes: TIME, CITIES and the Urban Audit indicator. For this example TIME will be selected. Click on the cross next to the box containing the word TIME, this will bring up the box with options for "TIME". If the user is interested in, for example, a combination of data from different years they can be selected from the list. In the view section of the window there are options that change the way the years are viewed, for example, if the user only wants the labels or codes to be shown or if they want both to be shown.
Once the required selections have been made for TIME, the options for CITIES and the Urban Audit indicator can be accessed by clicking on the tabs at the top of the data explorer window. In this example, the CITIES tab will be clicked on next, which will bring up the options for “CITIES”. The list of cities can be filtered by using the filtering section of the pop-up window. Specific cities, countries and codes can be searched for; however, place names can be in the native language of the country in question rather than in English, so when searched for it might say “No category found” (for example, München instead of Munich). Once the selection has been made and the user is content with how the data will be viewed (with only labels, only codes, or both labels and codes), the final tab can be selected.
The final tab is for the Urban Audit indicator and the tab is called “INDIC_UR”. Again, the user can choose specific variables from the list and change the way in which the variables are shown (with only labels, only codes, or both labels and codes). Once the selections have been made and the data have been formatted, click “Update” to see the data.
If you have chosen multiple variables, such as “Population on the 1st January” broken down by sex for example, they can be viewed at the same time on the same sheet. You can do this by dragging the symbol next to the indicator (INDIC_UR) and placing it in the top row of the table so that the Urban Audit indicator and TIME, for example, are shown together in the same column. “CITIES” and “TIME” can also be moved to show data in different ways.
Saving the data
To save a copy of the selected data the “download” option will need to be selected from the top right-hand side of the data explorer window. A screen displaying the download options will then appear. Data can be downloaded in seven different formats, these are:
Excel
CSV
HTML
PC AXIS
SPSS
TSV
PDF
For each download type there are a number of options; each set of options are slightly different depending on the need for each output type. In this example, the data will be downloaded in Excel; for this extraction, it is a good idea to select the option for the data to be downloaded into separate sheets and to have the labels in separate columns. Once the options have been selected, simply press “Download in Excel format”.