I get shapefiles of easements from surveyors/engineers and need to check that the shapefile lines match the line calls (metes and bounds) on the survey plat. What is the best way to see the COGO direction and distance of an existing line feature? I've tried doing trace lines with the traverse tool but it always comes out different, is there anything else I should be checking? Projection, datum?
Definitely check the projection the surveys are done in. Assuming your shapefile is in the correct projection, you can enable COGO on the layer and then use the update COGO tool to bulk-calculate the COGO attributes of the lines.
true curves?
will this meet your needs?
Trace traverse lines
You can populate the COGO attributes of a line into COGO fields. First you have to enable Cogo on your line feature class to generate the COGO fields and then you can use the Update COGO tool to populate the line's COGO attributes into the Cogo fields.