topic Re: Join to Shapefile for Analysis in Data Management Questions

Join to Shapefile for Analysis

alingonzalez — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:03:56 GMT

So I made a join of an excel file containing my data (fish counts, population density, water quality..ect) to a shapefile with area data (area, acres, hectares). In the attribute table, the join looks fine, all the data I wanted together is joined. The problem is when I try to do spatial stats analysis nothing from the exel file that was joined to the shapefile is available, only attributes from before the join. For example, when I want to use the High/Low Clustering Tool and use the shapefile with the join as the input, under "Input Field" I only have the potion to choose attributes from the shapefile before the join for analysis. I tried exporting the data into a new shapefile and am having the same problem.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what I possibly did wrong or forgot to do? Any help/suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks.

Ali

Re: Join to Shapefile for Analysis

AngelaHansen — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:14:15 GMT

Are the fields that are being joined coming in as text/string fields as opposed to numeric fields?

Re: Join to Shapefile for Analysis

alingonzalez — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:29:20 GMT

Are the fields that are being joined coming in as text/string fields as opposed to numeric fields?

I'm not sure, I'm still pretty new at ArcGIS. I made a join at a field that has 8 rows numbered 1-8 and the fields are named the same. Both the shapefile attribute table and excel file I'm joining have 8 rows numbered 1-8. On the excel file before importing it to ArcGIS, I went to the "Data" tab and clicked on "Text to Column", chose "Delimited" in step one, checked "Tab," in step 2, and chose "Text" for the column data format in step 3. I did this for all columns I was planning on using.. so I'm guessing it's coming in as text/string???