Attributing points with information from the polygons they intersect

[MaryHarris1]

I have a shapefile consisting of a set of points. I have another shapefile that consists of polygons. The polygons are divided into a number of classes; these classes are defined by a field in the attribute table for the polygon shapefile. The point data plots within the polygons and I would like to know which class of polygon each data point plots within. To do this easily, as I have thousands of data points, I would like to add a field (column) to the point shapefile that is populated for each point with the class of the polygon it falls within. I'm sure there's a tool that can do this for me but I am not sure which one suits best.

[RichardFairhurst · Accepted solution]

The tool to do this is the Spatial Join tool in the Analysis toolbox in the Overlay toolset.  It will create a new point feature class that will append all of the polygon attributes to the points or you can modify the field listing to only include some polygon fields.  Make the points the target features and the polygons the join features.  The One to One Intersection default settings should work fine.

[MaryHarris1]

Thanks Richard, this was very helpful. I coupled the Spatial Join tool with the Frequency tool in the statistics toolbox to get all the information I needed.

[MaryHarris1]

I have a follow-up question if you can help with this. Now I would like to generate the same information but for my symbology. So for my point dataset, I have assigned five different symbols (based on quantities), and now I want to generate the same information for each of these symbol groups. Is this possible?

[RichardFairhurst]

I don't have a clear idea of what you are now doing.  Do the quantities somehow relate to the polygons you originally spatially joined?  I would imagine that Summary Statistics, Dissolve, Spatial Join, Intersect or some combination can do most anything you need to do, but I don't have a clear picture of what shapes and data you are working with at this stage.