Simply Map is the place to go for marketing and business data. You can get point data for over 4.5 million US Businesses and Points-of-Interest including their contact and general information. You can also access market and media research industry data from Mediamark Research, Inc. Easy Analytic Software Inc. (EASI) has created a Life Stages data set that is also available through Simply Map.

The Yale Simply Map subscription provides acces to the Census data from 2000 and 2010, each in the 2000 and 2010 boundariesgeographies. 

Access to SimplyMap is provided to everyone at Yale at www.simplymap.com. If you are not on campus you will need to use the VPN client to get access. You do not have to create an account unless you want to save your work. To sign in without creating an account, use the Sign in as a guest link below the Sign In form.

Creating an account will allow you to create and save multiple maps and reports, filters, and favorite locations. SimplyMap will also remember recent variables, locations, and businesses and allow you to use them in new maps and reports. 

Setting the location will zoom the map to the level appropriate to show that feature on your screen. You can choose a feature at many of the levels available in SimplyMap, from the entire USA down to the Census Block Level. You can choose to use a single location or a custom location. At the larger scales, you can create a custom location that includes everything within a specified radius around your chosen location. You can also create a custom location by choosing multiple locations from your recent or favorite locations list.

You can add the locations to your favorites list if you want to use them in future maps. You do this by clicking on the "Actions" button that shows up when you hover over a location. You can remove them from the list in the Actions menu as well.

If you only want to see your chose locations, click display and choose "Apply location mask". 

The variables in SimplyMap are organized in categories that generally relate to the sources of the data. Within the categories are folders, where you can choose between looking at the data in 2000 or 2010 values. This allows for analysis between these two years of the census, which would otherwise not be possible because of the changes to the boundaries between 2000 and 2010. From there you can choose the specific variable and  aggregation that you want to see. 

Clicking on the Action button will allow you to take a look at the metadata associated with the variable.

Once you have chosen a variable, you can change the way that the data is displayed in your map using in the Legend. If you don't see the legend on your map you can go to the Display Options menu and click Show Legend. 

In the legend you can choose to manually change the geography or just allow SimplyMap to Auto-select Geo Unit if you want it to change the geography based on your zoom level. You can also change the date of the data for the variable that is appearing in your map. 

In the Edit Legend Menu you can choose the data classification method. SimplyMap offers three basic classification options: quantiles, natural breaks or equal intervals. According to The Nature of Geographic Information, using quantiles will create breaks so that each category contains the same number of data points. Using equal intervals creates categories that equal divide the  range of data, which creates categories with different numbers of data points. 

SimplyMap has provided access to a large database of business names and addresses that you can add to your map. You can search the businesses by keyword, name, NAICS code or SIC code, or a combination of those.