Losing data in table join

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07-21-2015 11:28 AM
DylanHamel
New Contributor II

Hello GIS community,

I have an excel table of data that includes columns with a race heading along with percentages of that race per school district. For some reason, there an was error (as seen below) where the American Indian column outputs as null for all values not 0. Why could this be the case? Originally, the American Indian column had a space, but I corrected for that (American_Indian), resaved in a different file, and still the same error came up.

Thanks for your help guys!

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DarrenWiens2
MVP Honored Contributor

Curious. I was about to tell you that you must be doing something wrong, but I can replicate what you're seeing (mostly).

1.) Create CSV with space in field name.

2.) Add CSV to ArcMap.

3.) Attempt join. Validation produces the error above.

4.) Remove CSV from ArcMap.

5.) Remove space from CSV field name outside ArcGIS.

6.) Save over original CSV.

7.) Add CSV to ArcMap, again.

8.) Inspect CSV table - looks good, no space.

9.) Attempt join. Still greeted by error on join validation.

I think this must be a bug of some sort. I'm not sure if the CSV file is kept in memory in some way.

Anyhow, a workaround is to close ArcMap, reopen ArcMap, and join with the fixed CSV. Or, save CSV to new file, but it sounds like you did this. Saving to new file works for me.

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2 Replies
DarrenWiens2
MVP Honored Contributor

Curious. I was about to tell you that you must be doing something wrong, but I can replicate what you're seeing (mostly).

1.) Create CSV with space in field name.

2.) Add CSV to ArcMap.

3.) Attempt join. Validation produces the error above.

4.) Remove CSV from ArcMap.

5.) Remove space from CSV field name outside ArcGIS.

6.) Save over original CSV.

7.) Add CSV to ArcMap, again.

8.) Inspect CSV table - looks good, no space.

9.) Attempt join. Still greeted by error on join validation.

I think this must be a bug of some sort. I'm not sure if the CSV file is kept in memory in some way.

Anyhow, a workaround is to close ArcMap, reopen ArcMap, and join with the fixed CSV. Or, save CSV to new file, but it sounds like you did this. Saving to new file works for me.

DylanHamel
New Contributor II

Thanks for attempting yourself and seeing my problem. I finally figured it out, thanks to your help! I had to completely copy/paste and resave the originally used file in a different document. Then close and reopen ArcMap, join the table and it worked.

I just want to note some things for people who may have a similar issue.

  • I had re-save the original file used in the first join, and I couldn't fill in the 'bad' columns with an additional join. For example, I had one column at one point that was all null values, and trying to delete that column and joining a separate .csv with only that column did not work.
  • I HAD to close ArcMAP and reopen, otherwise several columns gave me all null values.
  • I had to re-add the data from ArcCatalog, and I couldn't use the saved .mxd file that I originally was using.

Thanks again!