How to keep only perimeter / silhouette of a shapefile?

[AndreasSchnall]

Dear Forum users,

I have a shapefile with a number of polygones representing a combined area with different attributes.

For a simplified example let's think of a chess board of black and white squares, each a polygon.

How can I retain just the perimeter of the entire chessboard, so just the very outer perimter as a larger polygon?

Is this dissolve or some union operation?

Thanks for any help.

[AndreasSchnall]

yep it`s dissolve of course

[DonovanCameron]

Aside from dissolve, this can be also be done dynamically in an Edit Session.

You start by selecting the features you want 'dissolved'.

From the Editor pulldown menu, select the Merge function. It will then prompt you; What feature do you want all selected features merged too?

This works in the exact same way that the dissolve tool works, except, it doesn't require matching records in a field to qualify for a dissolve. And the feature attributes are controlled by the user (by having control over which feature all other selected features are dissolved into).

That merge function operates in an entirely different way than the Merge Tool found in the toolbox.