XY Table to Point tool - how is field length chosen?

Question

Hello -

I've got an .xlsx table in which some fields exceed 255 characters. The XY Table to Point tool, however, seems to set every text field to 255 or 254 (it was 254 last time I ran it on this table months ago; 255 today). There's no parameter in the tool to change this; it's just truncating my values. The help doesn't mention anything about field length. Is anyone familiar enough with this tool to know what's going on or how to work around it?

wayfaringrob · Answer

I see, thanks. I found an ArcMap help article that indicates the Table to Table tool allows you to specify field lengths, so I'll probably run that and then XY Table to Point. It would be nice if field mapping were built-in with Table to Point; it seems odd to have a default of 255 with no indication or option to change.

DanPatterson · Answer

I don't see anything specific on field truncation, but....

BUG-000130328: The field length defaults to 5,000 characters when u.. (esri.com)

it did go in the opposite direction at one time.

You could try ExcelToTable first to get a file geodatabase, the use XYTableToPoint on the result to see if the truncation is more general.