dBASE is a registered trademark of dBASE Inc. You could therefore remove the "CRIMES Events" layer and the "CRIMES" table from your Map now by right-clicking on them and selecting "Remove".ĪrcGIS® and ArcMap® are registered trademarks of Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. To help you keep track of the files that you have created, it is probably worth tidying up and removing any files which you no longer need. ArcMap will ask if you want to add the exported data as a map to the layer - say "Yes". dbf file previously) leave the 'Save as type' as "shapefile" click "Save" and finally "OK".
dbf, things can get a little confusing! It is best therefore, to name the shapefile something different to the name you used for the. car_crimes.shp (Note that because both dBASE and some ArcGIS files use the extension. Choose to save all features specify that you wish to use the same coordinate system as the layer's source data browse to the relevant directory and provide a suitable filename e.g. Right-click on the CRIMES Events layer in the Layers frame and then select Data > Export Data. To create a permanent dataset of the points, you need to convert the points to, for instance, a shapefile or a feature class. If you were to close ArcMap now, they would not be saved. These features (points) are not yet permanent though. ArcMap will automatically map the points in the Data Frame. This gives ArcMap all of the information it needs to map the coordinates. Select "Edit", then "Select" (to select a pre-existing coordinate system) and then browse until you find "British National Grid.prj" (under Projected Coordinate Systems > National Grids) click "Add" and then "OK".
In this example, the coordinate system is the British National Grid. At this point, we can also specify the coordinate system and/or projection for the points. Specify that we wish to use CRIMES as the table from which the coordinates will come and then select the fields which contain the X and Y coordinates of the points (in this case, X and Y respectively). We can do this using the Add XY data tool in ArcMap. Now, we need to get ArcMap to use the coordinates from the table to create points which we can then map. You can open the table by right-clicking on it in the Layers Frame and selecting "Open". This will create the file CRIMES.DBF (and, probably, some other associated files such as CRIMES.INF and CRIMES.MDX). "crimes", select Save as type dBASE IV (*.dbf) and then click "Export". Specify a pathname and suitable filename e.g. This table can be exported in dBASE(IV) format by selecting the table, right-clicking and then choosing "Export". This creates a table with three fields: CRIMEID, X, Y. With a name of less than 8 characters and not using spaces,īrackets or dashes), and to define the data type of eachįield (e.g. by using the auto-numberingįunction in the import wizard), to name each field (preferably Microsoft Access should be used to provide a unique (ideally numeric) In this example, our data are available as a text file crime_grefs.txt. Access can import data from all of the above formats. One of the best ways to get our coordinates into dBASE format is to use Microsoft Access.
ADDING XY DATA TO ARCMAP SOFTWARE
Coordinates may also have been processed or edited in other software packages such as Microsoft Excel and saved, for example, as an. Our coordinates may be in a range of formats including a simple text file, a comma-delimited (.csv) file, or a tab-delimited (.tab) file. ArcGIS is actually capable of importing a range of file types but one of the most robust and reliable formats for importing a set of point coordinates is dBASE(IV) format. First, we need to get the coordinates into a format which the GIS is capable of interpreting and importing. For this example, we shall use ArcGIS to map the points.