topic Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet in Data Management Questions

Converting polygons to spreadsheet

YoonsangBae — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:09:35 GMT

Hi, I am a student conducting a research on North Korean economic development. I think this must be a very basic question but could you help me with converting the GIS map into an excel spreadsheet?

So I downloaded the administrative districts of the country (which I got from http://diva-gis.org/datadown) and imported that data to ArcMap 10.1. The map contains polygons each representing certain district, and what I'm trying to do is make an excel spreadsheet in which each cell represents a certain point of the map (based on latitude and longitude) and shows 1 if that point is included in that district or 0 if not.

If my question is not so clear, I can elaborate more on that. Thank you so much in advance!

Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet

JoeBorgione — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:35:05 GMT

Hi, I am a student conducting a research on North Korean economic development. I think this must be a very basic question but could you help me with converting the GIS map into an excel spreadsheet?

So I downloaded the administrative districts of the country (which I got from http://diva-gis.org/datadown) and imported that data to ArcMap 10.1. The map contains polygons each representing certain district, and what I'm trying to do is make an excel spreadsheet in which each cell represents a certain point of the map (based on latitude and longitude) and shows 1 if that point is included in that district or 0 if not.

If my question is not so clear, I can elaborate more on that. Thank you so much in advance!

With all due respect, economic development in North Korea is going to be a very brief research project....

I think what you need to do is leave your polygons just the way they are, and create a spreadsheet (I prefer a database table) of your latitude, longitude pairs. You can then add your spreadsheet table as an xy event layer. After that, you can save that layer as point feature class. Finally you can perform a spatial join, (point in polygon) to get the polygon information as part of your point attributes table.

Adding a table.

Adding XY Data

Spatial Join

Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet

YoonsangBae — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 18:29:14 GMT

Thanks for the reply!
I think I'm almost there, but just seem to be unable to do the spatial join. The exact error message that I get is "The event table has no OID field or no unique value field, selections are not possible". I also tried to "join data", but a similar message occurs ("Source table must have an ObjectID column to perform a Join By Location")

Again, thank you in advance for the help!

Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet

JoeBorgione — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 11:42:33 GMT

"The event table has no OID field or no unique value field, selections are not possible". I also tried to "join data", but a similar message occurs ("Source table must have an ObjectID column to perform a Join By Location")

Again, thank you in advance for the help!

It sounds like you overlooked a step:

You can then add your spreadsheet table as an xy event layer. After that, you can save that layer as point feature class.

In the table of contents, right click on the event layer (the one that actually shows up as points). Select DATA and then EXPORT DATA, and follow the dialog. You can save it as a shapefile or you can save it as a geodatabase feature class, which is what I personally prefer. You'll be prompted to add the resulting shapefile/feature class to your ArcMap session. This is what you'll want to spatially join to your polygons.

One last step, don't be shy about the instructions in my signature block...

Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet

YoonsangBae — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 14:58:02 GMT

Yes, that solved the problem. But after running the spacial join, I don't see the information about the polygons in the attribute table for the join output. What could have gone wrong there?

Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet

JoeBorgione — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 15:17:14 GMT

Yes, that solved the problem. But after running the spacial join, I don't see the information about the polygons in the attribute table for the join output. What could have gone wrong there?

Without knowing what your actual steps were I can't even guess. I just performed a point in polygon spatial join and it works for me.

Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet

YoonsangBae — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 17:18:46 GMT

Thanks for the reply again. I went over the entire process again, but can't really tell what went wrong. Would it be possible for you to take a look at the files that I'm working with, if that's not too much of work for you?

Re: Converting polygons to spreadsheet

JoeBorgione — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 18:35:23 GMT

Thanks for the reply again. I went over the entire process again, but can't really tell what went wrong. Would it be possible for you to take a look at the files that I'm working with, if that's not too much of work for you?

Let's take this offline; send me a private message and we can discuss it that way.