Adding coordinates into ArcMap - Help needed

[AmySteel]

Im working with a DEM downloaded from Digimap of the Orkney islands to asses the visibility impacts of wind turbines using a view shed analysis. I've complied a document of the wind turbines in Excel to use for the analysis, with their locations in British national grid - Eastings and Northings. However, the problem that I'm having is that I can get this to import into ArcMap and work. If i import with the BNG from a tab delimited file or normal workbook then Arc doesn't reconise any data is present and lists everything as a column - if i have 30 rows of data then there will be 30 columns all labelled fields 1-30.

If i convert to decimal degrees as I read online this might be easier, then the longitude value is a Negative, but this won't display either the fields just display as 'Null'. I have tried adding the compass bearings on to the end of each number to see if this helps but no luck and I have then removed this and made sure the cells are formatted to 'Number' but again it still displays as 'Null'. I have spent hours looking online and cannot find a reasonable solution..

Any help would be much appreciated

[JorgeOrellana]

Sounds like you may have some issues with the formatting of the spreadsheet. I know sometimes Excel and Arc are not so friendly and saving the table as a CSV may solve your issue.

Bu take a look here first:

Best Practices When Using Excel Files with ArcGIS‌

If you have followed all the steps in the link above and still can't get it to work, maybe post you spreadsheet for a diagnosis.

Cheers

[AmySteel]

Thanks for the quick response, I originally had everything correct that was on the link you attached so nothing there is the problem. With the lat/long is it best to add in the directions after each? For example: 58.7505711066W or just leave it as 58.7505711066 when importing?

Regards

[DanPatterson_Retired]

You long/lat appears to be in text format if it has W or N in it.  You will need to strip the letters and turn the text into numbers.  Remember Longitude is -ve in the western hemisphere and latitude is -ve in the southern hemisphere...positive otherwise

[JorgeOrellana]

There is no need to add the W or N to it as Dan pointed out. Have you  tried saving it to a different file format? i.e. CSV and see what that gives you when  you bring it into Arc? I know Arc and Excel sometimes don't get along all that well.

Could there be any hidden cells that you may have over looked? Or in the column headings any special characters such as @ / & * # ? < > and so on? Also any spaces in the column headings? Other than those suggestions which are the most common issues that I've come accross it's tough to know what could be wrong without looking at a sample of the spreadsheet.

Cheers

[AmySteel]

I converted to CSV and the same issue happened again of table just showing lots of fields, which goes from 1-34. Ive attached a screen capture of this along with the spreadsheet.

[JorgeOrellana]

Interesting. I opened up the sample that you attached and the only thing I see being an issue is  there is a trailing space after Longitude in the Field Name which was causing that column to show as null values, but the Lat column imported correctly. I also notice there is a space at the end of the longitude in the xls file name hat may be causing issues.

What  version of Arc are you on? I am running 10.0 and see no issues with it other than what I noted above. I attached the spreadsheet that you provided as a CSV. All I did was remove the space at the end of the Longitude, and in Excel  saved i as a CSV. See if you can load that into arc.

Cheers

[AmySteel]

Thank you very much! Thats done the trick.. HOWEVER the co-ordinates are now not appearing in the right place. When i added world imagery to check the were in the correct place, they are appearing in the middle of the sea off the coast of Newquay when they should be the other end of the country in Orkney off the coast of Scotland..any idea why? The co-ordinates work fine in google earth and appear in the right place there?

[JorgeOrellana]

They look ok to me. What projection did  you set it to when you added the points? I set it to WGS 84 and they appear in the right spot.

[JoeFlannery]

See attached.