If you are familiar with the Points to Line tool, do you have any ideas about why I'm getting the following behavior.
I have a shapefile of points:
From the Points to Line help (Points To Line—Data Management toolbox | ArcGIS Desktop) this is a graphical representation of what the tool does:
What I'm hoping for is roughly the same thing, i.e. the line my 5 year old would draw if I asked him to connect the green points. But instead, I'm getting this:
I'm leaving Line_Field blank, Sort_Field blank, and have tried both checking and unchecking Close_Line
I know I want to leave Line_Field blank because I want all points treated the same way. I'm also leaning towards leaving Close_Line unchecked because I would eventually like to use the (correct) output line to connect with another line to make a polygon, so I don't want the end vertex to be the same as the start vertex. But I'm open to ideas about the Sort_Field. The description of the default behavior is that "points used to create each output line feature will be used in the order they are found."
Any ideas?