topic Joining a census profile.DBF file to a shapefile in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Joining a census profile.DBF file to a shapefile

Maping101 — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 03:14:53 GMT

Hello,

I'm working on a project and need to map different census profiles within a certain geographic region. I know I'd need to spatially join the .DBF file with a common identifier such as UID or CT name. The issue I'm having is that my .DBF file (which contains a census profile such as income) , seems to be missing values when I open the table in ArcGIS Pro. This would effect the accuracy of my map, and likely give me an error when I try to join it to a spatial dataset. Would it be better to use a different file type such as .csv or another to get around this?

Thank you

Re: Joining a census profile.DBF file to a shapefile

Dan_DMR — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:50:30 GMT

I've historically only had success with csv. You'll also need to make sure that the data type for the join field in the csv is the same as the join field in the shapefile. If I recall it's common that the GEOID is text in one and numerical in the other. You'll need to make a copy field in the correct data type and calculate that field to equal the values in the original field.

Re: Joining a census profile.DBF file to a shapefile

Maping101 — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 23:11:00 GMT

Thank you Dan. The only way I've got it working so far is to save the file as an .xlsx. I'm the past, .csv files have often cut off decimals, which was an issue. I used CTNAME as the common identifier variable.