Field alias and shapefiles

Question

I have created a shapefile and joined an Excel table to this shapefile to populate the attribute table. This shapefile is for someone else in our department (end user) and so I wanted to add Field Aliases to help them understand the field names. When I export the shapefile with the joined Excel table, the newly created shapefile does not retain the Field Aliases I set. This is an issue for the end user of this data may be exporting data from this shapefile in the future, thus losing those Field Aliases...

Why is this happening?

I understand that working in a file geodatabase may resolve the issue, but the end user of this data prefers shapefiles.

Any thoughts of suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

AdrianWelsh · Answer

I agree. Another option is a map package

Creating a map package—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop

JoeBorgione · Answer

Why not just name the fields in such a fashion that the end user understands them; no aliasing needed....

RichardFairhurst · Answer

If your real goal is to make sure the aliases are shown with the exported shapefile in a layer, you can save a layer file of the layer you set up with aliases and they will be preserved.  If you provide the layer file together with any exported shapefile to anyone then they can add the layer file to their map instead of the shapefile.  If you use relative paths with standardized naming for your exported shapefiles and output them to the same directory as layer files set up for the standardized names, you can zip that directory and the receiver can add the layer file to their map rather than the shapefile and they shouldn't need to repoint the data source.  At worst, the receiver may have to change the layer file data source to get everything working again.