I have been receiving error 001486 whenever I try to calculate geometry on a joined table, even when the field that calculation is going into is associated with the shapefile I'm baseing my calculation on. See screenshot below:
As you can see, 'towns', my input features, is a shapefile:
And the 'Area_km' is part of that attribute table. The error implies that this is due to the field being in the joined table:
Description
If a layer has a table joined to it, editing fields from the join table is not allowed.
Solution
Make sure the fields that are edited are present in the input table and not the joined table.
But this is not the case! My question is: Is Calculating Geometry always prevented with joined tables? If so, why?