How should the census tract field be formatted for Mappoint 2002 to understand it.

First I had it as a 4 digit number 0050 or 1641 etc.,, I then changed the format to 50.00 or 16.41. This appeared to be putting it in the format that Mappoint 2002 would display on some sample maps.

Census Tracts are not tied to a certain location. I might have a census tract 16.41 in Los Angeles, another 16.41 in Omaha and another 16.41 in New York. Thus all of my census tracts were not matched when I ran the mapping wizard. Do I need to reformat them again so that the input looks like 16.41,Los Angeles,CA....?

I currently have to bring up each unmatched record and match it up with the right census city state combination that is listed.

I think you have to include your state name (or abbreviation) and county name in your data set. I did that and it seemed to work. My problem is that my census tracts are based on the 2000 census, and I think the ones in MapPoint are based on the 1990 census. I have tract numbers in my data that don't seem to exist in MapPoint, and there are some in MapPoint that don't seem to exist in my dataset.
Sigh...

:P

I have fought this very issue for the last 2 days straight, and came up with an inelegant solution . . .

In my data set (an Excel spreadsheet) I added a field for State and county, then had a field for the 4 digit census tract.

Do a Google search on Census tract codes. You'll find your way to a census.gov TIGER site that talks about converting 2000 tracts to 1990 tracts. You can then download an entire state's list of census codes that will include the 1990 code, 2000 code and some other population info (it is almost all numbers without field names).

Some of the web screens will help you understand what the census codes mean (like what it looks like when a 1990 tract has been split into 2 2000 tracts, or mergers, deletions, additions, or other stuff). I MANUALLY matched my 2k codes with the 1990 (270 records), then was able to have Mappoint plot the data.

It wasn't too bad, just alot of time staring at pages of #'s.