Merging rows of an Excel table in ArcMap

[SLouq]

I have a Hydrology feature which represents all the Hydrology in my community and was tasked with calculating the miles of all the ditches. However, the lines which represent the ditches are broken into segments. This was easy enough to do by exporting the attribute table out to a dbf file and then opening the .dbf file in Access to create the queries I needed and then export them out to Excel to perform the calculation. I just hid all the line segments so they wouldn't have so many rows in my table

Now that I have an Excel spreadsheet which contains the information I want, I would like to store it as a table in a file geodatabase. But when I load them into a file geodatabase, all the segments are not hidden anymore. I thought I would just be able to select the rows again in ArcMap and then use Merge under the Editor toolbar to merge all the segments together but Merge is not activated when I do this. Is there another way to accomplish what I am trying to do?

[JoeBorgione · Accepted solution]

Despite the fact that the ditches are broken up into segments, do they carry a common trait, like a ditch name?  If so you might want to take a look at creating a summary table, summing the length by the name of the ditch. Personally, I prefer to keep my data in one place (ArcGIS) and avoid exporting it to other formats.

[SLouq]

Thanks for the reply Joe!

A summary table may be the way to go. Never thought about trying that.

Everybody is familiar with Excel that's why I had exported it to Excel

Thanks!

Scott

[JoeBorgione]

See  Jay Johnson‌'s comment in Cell tower data for USA? referring to the "devil's database".  I've taken up that moniker for Excel.  Just because 'everyone is familiar with it' doesn't mean it's the the proper tool for spatial analyses.  You can always export your summary table to a dbf for those less enlightened...