Hello everyone!
I'm currently trying to calibrate stationing along a highway, but I need the stationing to be straight numbers ("54000" instead of the typical "540+00"). I have an Excel document that the correct formatting is in, and I thought I'd join it with our current stationing shapefile, but when I import it into ArcMAP, the field is automatically changed to a string. I need it to be a number field. That's the only way the calibrate tool will work. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Things I've tried:
Changing field type from ArcCatalog (which I found you can't change from text to number)
Setting the type in Excel to number
EDIT: I fixed it myself. Apparently if you save your Excel document as a .csv first, then import it, ArcMAP will automatically make the field numeric.
Excel used to have the ability to click on the field name and set its properties to prevent wrong data types... or am I thinking of Quattro Pro?
You can set the type (if I understand what you're referencing -- see below) but it doesn't actually change the field type in ArcMAP.
You can set the type but ArcGIS also checks to make sure it makes sense. For example, you can set a column of numbers in Excel to text and it will import as text, but if you set a column of text to number in Excel, it will import as text into ArcGIS because you can't have non-numerical characters in a numerical field within ArcGIS.
You can modify a schema.ini file to tweak file types (but of course in this case the + would not support importing as a number as it was rightly pointed out above).
Adding an ASCII or text file table—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop