ArcMap Help needed for Student Project - Creating coordinates

[DeborahWillson]

I am using version 10.2.2 provided by the university and need to manually create the locations of organic grocery stores for three cities for my project. My project is to determine the income range within walkable distance to those grocery stores. How do you create the location id or coordinates for those locations? There are no existing files, so I will have to create the attribute table myself. I do not have much experience in GIS, so much help would be appreciated!

[TimWitt2]

Hey Deborah,

Do you have a spreadsheet of those stores? Or addresses?

First you would need to create a geodatabase in ArcCatalog

As the coordinate system I would choose WGS84.

Once this is done within ArcCatalog right click in your geodatabase and click New -> Feature Class...

Name it Grocery_Stores.

Once this is done, open an MXD and then use the add data button to add the Grocery_Store feature set. Now you could use the World Geocode Service locator to find each store and add a point to your new Grocery_Store feature for each location, via editing mode.

Hope this helps!

Tim

[DeborahWillson]

I have the addresses to the stores, but not a spreadsheet yet since I am not sure what to input in excel. This is a good starting point though and helps. Thank you very much!

[TimWitt2]

Let me know if you have any more questions!

[DeborahWillson]

Do you know how to convert. dat files to shapefiles? After I added the addresses to the my places, it saved as a .dat file.

[TimWitt2]

Could you share this file? Or your initial file?

[DeborahWillson]

Sorry it took awhile to reply. The file was at my school, but I can't seem to figure out how to share it. I did manage to get access to credits through my university to geocode the addresses though! Thank you very much for your help.

[KyleDixon]

You'll need to use Census income data. Your school should have a DataMaps2014 folder, look in: DataMaps2014\usa\Census\blkgrp.sdc.

If you have to use points, join to blockpop.sdc

[KyleDixon]

Do you need locations of the stores or locations of the points people are walking from?

My answer above is to create the points people would be walking from.

[DeborahWillson]

The location of the stores. I plan to create a quarter mile radius around each store to see what the income ranges are surrounding the stores. Thank you for your response!