This was not very hard for me to do after I had all of the information from the Census Bureau website and learned the basics about how to convert these things to be able to work on ARC GIS. I used excel extensively over this past summer and it was nice to know the basics when I was converting these files into a readable file for export. I had never had to convert something without the borders and all of that into excel so that was pretty interesting and could come in handy sometime down the road. One problem that did arise is that my state supposedly had a county for 1900-1910 but then that county disappeared from the rest of the data. I consulted with the professor and we agreed to just forget about this ghost county and delete it from the files. After I did this all my Fips codes matched up and I was able to take the next step in the exercise. I had never used open office and I doubt I ever will again but if I do have to use it then at least I will know how.
