Problems with lat long projection

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11-01-2012 07:02 AM
StevenDouglas1
New Contributor III
Hi this seems like it should be an easy problem, but its been giving me a headache.

I have a .xls spreadsheet with about 60,000 rows. Most of them have Latitude and Longitude.
I simply want to display these as points. 

I've tried making a .dbf in arccatalog and creating a feature class from XY data.  The first times I tried this the rows that had no lat/long were given 0,0.  The problem is the scale is about 1:1e200+ feet... so the points with correct lat/long are all together but so tiny I can't even zoom into them. 
So the second time I just took out all the rows without lat/long.  Now the points show up but compared to the old points and the counties they are not lined up and they are tiny...

I've also tried using it as a .csv and as the .xls and in QGIS. I went through all the rows and took out the lat/long points that were entered incorrectly as well...

Here is a screen shot. The little red point is actually 40,000 points on a scale of 1:84 feet... The projection is the same as the other layers and when I click on individual points they have the same lat/long, just in different spots.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]18941[/ATTACH]

Here is the projection for the old points

Data Type: Shapefile Feature Class
Geometry Type: Point

Projected Coordinate System: NAD_1983_StatePlane_Florida_West_FIPS_0902_Feet
Projection: Transverse_Mercator
False_Easting: 656166.66666667
False_Northing: 0.00000000
Central_Meridian: -82.00000000
Scale_Factor: 0.99994118
Latitude_Of_Origin: 24.33333333
Linear Unit:  Foot_US

Geographic Coordinate System: GCS_North_American_1983
Datum:  D_North_American_1983
Prime Meridian:  Greenwich
Angular Unit:  Degree

And the new points

Data Type: Shapefile Feature Class
Geometry Type: Point

Projected Coordinate System: NAD_1983_StatePlane_Florida_West_FIPS_0902_Feet
Projection: Transverse_Mercator
False_Easting: 656166.66666667
False_Northing: 0.00000000
Central_Meridian: -82.00000000
Scale_Factor: 0.99994118
Latitude_Of_Origin: 24.33333333
Linear Unit:  Foot_US

Geographic Coordinate System: GCS_North_American_1983
Datum:  D_North_American_1983
Prime Meridian:  Greenwich
Angular Unit:  Degree


Thanks for the help.
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MelitaKennedy
Esri Notable Contributor
Hi Steven,

Like I said on GIS.SE (GIS stackexchange website), set the coordinate system of the latitude-longitude data to NAD 1983 (geographic coordinate system, North America).

You need to tell the software what coordinate system the points are georeferenced to now. Then ArcMap can project the points on-the-fly (in-memory) to the data frame's coordinate system. Once they're lining up correctly, if you want to save the data as a feature class, right click the layer in the table of contents and choose data, export data. That tool will give you the option of writing out the points in their native coordinate system (lat/lon) or in the data frame's (State Plane).

Hope this helps,
Melita

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MelitaKennedy
Esri Notable Contributor
Hi Steven,

Like I said on GIS.SE (GIS stackexchange website), set the coordinate system of the latitude-longitude data to NAD 1983 (geographic coordinate system, North America).

You need to tell the software what coordinate system the points are georeferenced to now. Then ArcMap can project the points on-the-fly (in-memory) to the data frame's coordinate system. Once they're lining up correctly, if you want to save the data as a feature class, right click the layer in the table of contents and choose data, export data. That tool will give you the option of writing out the points in their native coordinate system (lat/lon) or in the data frame's (State Plane).

Hope this helps,
Melita
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