I am very new to GIS. When I import the excel document and hit “Display XY Data” the X and Y field do not have any options in the drop down menu. Do you know why this is the case? I have been trying to figure this out for hours now and believe it is a simple error on my part. Any assistance you provide would be greatly appreciated.
If you look at the field properties for latitude or longitude, you'll see that they are string type. They are guaranteed to be string because there are non-numerical characters in the field (quotes). Remove the quotes and the fields may be interpreted as number when you reload.
The drop down lists only show number data type fields. Make sure your coordinates are in a number data type field - even though they might be numbers, they may be in string fields.
Iaxmi,
In addition to what Darren said, I often like to save my Excel spreadsheet as a CSV file then use the CSV in GIS. This way I can open my CSV file separately in Excel to see if there are any obvious errors before bringing it into GIS. If you're still having issues, please post a screenshot of what you're seeing.
Thanks you. This is what it looks like.
This might be a stupid question but where can I check the coordinate data type? Thank you for your help.
Another way of making sure you have number fields is to change it in Excel. Make sure the field is actually all numeric values (no quotes like Darren said) and change the field type drop down to Number
Like you said it has string type and I do not see any place where I can edit it !! Can you help me with that too. I am very New to this thing so I have no knowledge about anything. Thank you for your patience.
Like you said, the fields were all General and I tried to change the lat and long to number but still not working.
The Lat/Lon fields in your excel sheet will need a lot of cleaning.
Apart from the quotes, you also need to remove rows containing other string values (e.g. Parking Lot and other Text values) or you can replace the text with the numeric Lat./Lon. values, if you know them.
For deleting the quotes MS Excel, select all the cells of Lat./Lon. columns. Then execute a Find and Replace (Ctrl + F). Replace " with blank (Don't put any space). Click Replace All.
Also replace other texts in Lat./Lon. columns with their respective numeric Lat./Lon. values.
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