Separating overlapping polygons

[MiriannaBudimir]

Hi,

I have several shapefiles with hundreds of polygons in each of them. In each shapefile, some of the polygons overlap. Is there any way to somehow get the polygons which overlap to be separated into a separate shapefile? So that I still have all the data, but none which overlap? I tried splitting the layer by it's attributes (ID number), but I end up with three thousand separate shapefiles, which is really unmanageable for what I need to do with them later.

I appreciate any help or suggestions!

Mirianna

[DaleHoneycutt]

Assuming your feature class is called "MyPolys".  Run the Intersect tool with MyPolys as the input.  The output feature class (default name would be MyPolys_Intersect) will be the polygons that overlap each other.

If you want to remove these overlaps from MyPolys, run the Erase tool with MyPolys as input and MyPolys_Intersect as the Erase Features.