Selecting a Study Area
Selecting an area of inquiry will allow you to discover, extract, analyse and visualise the data that you’re interested in.
When you log in to the portal, your project will start with Australia selected as your highest level of geography.
From here you can select the levels of geography you are interested in. There are two ways to do this, by clicking either of the options under the Area panel (shown below)

Clicking on the Area Selection option under the Area panel will bring up the Area Selection pop-up box, which gives you three options of choosing your area of enquiry. If you are interested in understanding all of these options, have a look at the Selecting your Area help documentation
Selecting a defined Geographic Area
The Select area selection method is second tab option
In this method, you move further and further down the nested geographies of the Australian Bureau of Statistics until you have found your area of inquiry.
In this tutorial, we will be moving down the options until we come to 2016 Greater Melboure Capital Statistical Area (Greater Melbourne GCCSA 2016). You can also interact with the map itself at this stage, clicking on the areas, further breaking them down into their constituent parts.
Clicking Done will close the browser and zoom the map to the level of geography that you have selected. Your portal session should look something like the image below
It is important that you have selected the 2016 GCCSA

Selecting some Data
After selecting your area of analysis, you now need to bring some data into your AURIN portal session to visualise, interrogate and analyse.
The Data panel (shown below) provides you with three options for selecting data. Each of these will be explained in more detail below

For this part of the tutorial, we will be using the first option, so click the + Dataset button

This button calls up the Data Browser window, giving users access to the datasets that are available for their use from the many AURIN data custodians around the country.
The first thing to note is that the number of datasets that are available to you when you open the Data Browser window is restricted by your area selection – the smaller the area that you select, the fewer the datasets that will be available within your session
There are many ways that you can filter and search for datasets within the data browser. You can do a Keyword search, limit your search to a specific level of aggregation or granularity, or limit to the organisation/data custodian that you’re interested in.
When you select a dataset (shown below), the dialogue box will then require you to select the attributes you want for the data – the three shown in the image below (you can also select all of the attributes by clicking the top left check box next to Attributes) The abstract for your data is provided in the top right of the Data Browser window.
Once you have selected your dataset and attributes, you can click either Add or Add and Open. The former option will keep your Data Browser open, so that you can shop for more datasets, but it will not automatically retrieve your dataset from the custodian/source. You will still need to do this by clicking on the specific dataset entry in the Data panel later. The latter option will close your Data Browser window and automatically retrieve the dataset from the custodian/source. Click Add and Open
For this tutorial, select SA2 SEIFA 2016 – The Index of Relative Socio-economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD), select the three attributes shown below and then click Add & Open to close the data browser

This will add the dataset to your Data panel, and it will open up the table for your perusal. You can sort the columns by the values by click on each column header. You can also download the dataset directly to your desktop in .csv (comma separated values) if you prefer, by clicking the small “CSV” icon on the top left of the table.
Adding Additional Variables to a Table of Data, and adding another dataset
At this stage, we may decide that we have accidentally missed some variables that we would actually like to have in the table for further use down the track. Rather than deleting the dataset and re-shopping for it with all of the variables, we can actually add the variables to the existing table. To do this, click on the spanner icon on the right next to the data entry, and click on the Edit option (as shown below)

This will open up the list of attributes, and you can add Usual resident population to your list of selected attributes. Once you click Edit and Open this will re-shop for the dataset, and you will see the additional variable in the resultant table when it opens
Now we will repeat the shopping process for an additional dataset. Using the keyword homeless, add the following dataset to your data panel (with all of the variables selected, as per the image below)
SA2 Estimating Homelessness 2016
