GIS project

Question

I am in charge of a GIS project for an internship I am doing this summer. I have taken a few GIS classes but by no means am I an expert, and no one in the office knows much about GIS. I have to map the locations of their projects, most of which have been in Colorado. I have the specific addresses for most of the projects as well as the counties. What would be the best way to go about this? I have added the USA state boundaries and the USA counties layers, but I am having difficulty joining the excel sheet with the information about the projects to the county layer. Using the specific address would be a better representation of the projects, but I don't know how to do that from scratch. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

CameronBentley · Answer

Thank You Lucas and Joe! I guess my first step is to find the street data and then geocode my table against that.

Thanks

JoeBorgione · Answer

I am in charge of a GIS project for an internship I am doing this summer. I have taken a few GIS classes but by no means am I an expert, and no one in the office knows much about GIS. I have to map the locations of their projects, most of which have been in Colorado. I have the specific addresses for most of the projects as well as the counties. What would be the best way to go about this? I have added the USA state boundaries and the USA counties layers, but I am having difficulty joining the excel sheet with the information about the projects to the county layer. Using the specific address would be a better representation of the projects, but I don't know how to do that from scratch. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

See this thread I recently responded to.  You need to get some data to geocode against; in the other thread the guy only has zip codes.  You've got addresses. You should be able to find good street data to match against in Colorado. There are a ton of good people doing tons more good work there.  I just googled 'gis data colorado download' and hit the jackpot...

[Looks like Lucas beat me to it; two for two though... Geocoding is what you want to do...]

Lucas Danzinger · Answer

You need to geocode your addresses. You can download some Address Locators from the Esri Data and Maps package located in your customer care portal (http://customers.esri.com). There are several resources that explain the basics of geocoding. You could start with the tutorials, too.