Adding OAC to Your Data

When you purchase a commercial geodemographic classification you also buy the support and software which the companies have developed to help you apply the classification to your data. For a non commercial classification such as OAC these tools are not available and users either have to employ a consultant to do the analysis for them or do it themselves. We hope these instructions and guides go some way towards the latter, however if users are really stuck then feel free to drop an email to a member of the steering group or the mailing list.

This guide is now divided into two parts which reflects recent changes to the way in which OAC has been disseminated. Our original guide detailed the manual steps required to append OAC to your data, however, this required some knowledge of Microsoft Access Databases and Excel and was reasonably complicated. We have left this tutorial on the website (referred to as Advanced) as it might still be of use to some users. Our new tutorial is far simpler and uses the free OACoder software from Publicprofiler.

In both tutorials we will describe how you can join the OAC classification to your data. We are assuming that your data will be in a tabular format, containing a row for each person you want to profile and that one of your columns will be a unit postcode (e.g. WC1E 6BT). Therefore your data may look something like this:

This tutorial will assume your data is in Microsoft Excel format.

Basic Tutorial (Coming Very Soon!) – OAC Coding with the OACoder Software

1) Download OACoder Software
2) Append OAC Codes to your data
3) Profiling your data

Advanced tutorial – Manually Create an OAC Database

1) Creating the OAC classification database
2) Importing your data into the OAC classification database
3) Profiling your data