topic Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed in Geoprocessing Questions

Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

AmySteel — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 15:23:41 GMT

Im working with a DEM downloaded from Digimap of the Orkney islands to asses the visibility impacts of wind turbines using a view shed analysis. I've complied a document of the wind turbines in Excel to use for the analysis, with their locations in British national grid - Eastings and Northings. However, the problem that I'm having is that I can get this to import into ArcMap and work. If i import with the BNG from a tab delimited file or normal workbook then Arc doesn't reconise any data is present and lists everything as a column - if i have 30 rows of data then there will be 30 columns all labelled fields 1-30.

If i convert to decimal degrees as I read online this might be easier, then the longitude value is a Negative, but this won't display either the fields just display as 'Null'. I have tried adding the compass bearings on to the end of each number to see if this helps but no luck and I have then removed this and made sure the cells are formatted to 'Number' but again it still displays as 'Null'. I have spent hours looking online and cannot find a reasonable solution..

Any help would be much appreciated

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

JorgeOrellana — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 15:29:31 GMT

Sounds like you may have some issues with the formatting of the spreadsheet. I know sometimes Excel and Arc are not so friendly and saving the table as a CSV may solve your issue.

Bu take a look here first:

Best Practices When Using Excel Files with ArcGIS‌

If you have followed all the steps in the link above and still can't get it to work, maybe post you spreadsheet for a diagnosis.

Cheers

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

AmySteel — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 11:14:30 GMT

Thanks for the quick response, I originally had everything correct that was on the link you attached so nothing there is the problem. With the lat/long is it best to add in the directions after each? For example: 58.7505711066W or just leave it as 58.7505711066 when importing?

Regards

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

DanPatterson_Retired — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 11:26:39 GMT

You long/lat appears to be in text format if it has W or N in it. You will need to strip the letters and turn the text into numbers. Remember Longitude is -ve in the western hemisphere and latitude is -ve in the southern hemisphere...positive otherwise

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

JorgeOrellana — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 13:13:45 GMT

There is no need to add the W or N to it as Dan pointed out. Have you tried saving it to a different file format? i.e. CSV and see what that gives you when you bring it into Arc? I know Arc and Excel sometimes don't get along all that well.

Could there be any hidden cells that you may have over looked? Or in the column headings any special characters such as @ / & * # ? < > and so on? Also any spaces in the column headings? Other than those suggestions which are the most common issues that I've come accross it's tough to know what could be wrong without looking at a sample of the spreadsheet.

Cheers

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

AmySteel — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 12:54:39 GMT

I converted to CSV and the same issue happened again of table just showing lots of fields, which goes from 1-34. Ive attached a screen capture of this along with the spreadsheet.

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

JorgeOrellana — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:25:09 GMT

Interesting. I opened up the sample that you attached and the only thing I see being an issue is there is a trailing space after Longitude in the Field Name which was causing that column to show as null values, but the Lat column imported correctly. I also notice there is a space at the end of the longitude in the xls file name hat may be causing issues.

What version of Arc are you on? I am running 10.0 and see no issues with it other than what I noted above. I attached the spreadsheet that you provided as a CSV. All I did was remove the space at the end of the Longitude, and in Excel saved i as a CSV. See if you can load that into arc.

Cheers

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

DanPatterson_Retired — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:25:58 GMT

copy the fieldnames and the first couple of rows of the data so we can look at it.
If you are still working in a spreadsheet, you need to explicitly format the column to an appropriate decimal type, if you just remove the N from the cell entry, it is still text even though it looks like a number. Also, by default text is left justified and numbers are right justified.

ps there is no attachment

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

JoeFlannery — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:28:25 GMT

I'm using ArcMap 10.2.1 and brought the xls file directly into ArcMap with no problems.

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

ScottDean — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:36:47 GMT

You may also want to look at this toolbox which has conversion tools but I am not sure what ArcGIS version you are running. This is for 10+.

http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=f3d91b8f852042e289e09a7ec8342431‌

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

AmySteel — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:43:30 GMT

Thank you very much! Thats done the trick.. HOWEVER the co-ordinates are now not appearing in the right place. When i added world imagery to check the were in the correct place, they are appearing in the middle of the sea off the coast of Newquay when they should be the other end of the country in Orkney off the coast of Scotland..any idea why? The co-ordinates work fine in google earth and appear in the right place there?

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

JorgeOrellana — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:48:47 GMT

They look ok to me. What projection did you set it to when you added the points? I set it to WGS 84 and they appear in the right spot.

Re: Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

JoeFlannery — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 14:09:27 GMT

See attached.