what format do the coordinates need to be in? 42 31 31.334, -77 32 45.32 was what i tried

[JimBurdett]

i want to add lat long locations to map.  I tried importing a .txt file with coordinates.  what format do the coordinates need to be in?  42 31 31.334, -77 32 45.32 was what i tried

[SusanJones]

Decimal Degrees - 42.5, -77.5 etc

It shouldn't struggle as long as it gets parsed as numeric instead of strings.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

you currently have this 42 31 31.334 which is degrees minutes and seconds, you need to convert them to decimal degrees...written out syntactically

42 31 31.334 =  42. 31.522233333 degrees decimal minutes = 42.525370555 decimal degrees

degrees remains, then take seconds and divide by 60...add that to minutes...divide that by 60 and that is the decimal portion of the term

[JimBurdett]

After convering to decimal degrees, I tried the command “add layer from file” with the .txt file and got the errror below

[DanPatterson_Retired]

X is longitude (-77ish) Y is latitude (42ish)  Make sure that you have a comma-delimited field name and no blank lines in the data

[curtvprice]

You need actual numeric xy coordinates in geographic ("decimal degrees") or projected (e.g. "meters") to plot them on a map.

Fortunately, if you name the field names exactly right, those locations can be converted on the fly for you. There's also a tool available that can convert those text strings to geographic (decimal degrees).

The skinny is here in the ArcGIS help (this applies to 10.1/10.2):

Adding an ASCII or text file table  >  How coordinate information is determined

[SusanJones]

From what application - Portal, ESRI Desktop (ArcMap) ?

Try saving file as a csv file.