How to join an Excel spreadsheet onto an attribute table in ArcMap 10.0

Today I am going to show you how to make a join onto an attribute table in arcmap 10.0. First what we need to do is we need to click on the world country boundaries layer, just so we can have a look at the attribute table. So we just opened the table and you can see the different fields above here like the name of the country, there is a country code here and at the moment we have got the region of the world all these countries are in. What we're going to do though is I've got some data on an excel sheet of all the different countries that play rugby in the world and it's got the number of rugby players playing senior rugby in each country. And we're going to attempt to join that data onto this attribute table. So as you can see I'll just show you one more time that at this point we only got about one, two, three, four - four fields showing and this is going to get longer. The next thing we need to do is we need to tidy up an excel sheet. This is because arcmap won't accept certain types of formatting from the excel sheet. Now if you look here we've got the fields of country name, country code and senior male players. However arcmap does not like gaps like we've got here. It doesn't like dollar signs. It doesn't like numbers being in the top field and it doesn't even like gaps like the one we've got here between country codes. So let's tidy up a bit. We'll delete that. We'll get rid of this here and we will get rid of that and we'll actually get rid of both these fields all together as well. So delete, delete. Now just looking down here everything looks nice and tidy. And now I believe this excel sheet is ready for me to import into arcmap. Now we need to save this excel sheet. Go into file, "save as" and what we want to do is we want to save this as a CSV file because I've found that arcmap quite like these. So we'll go this one here, csv, save. Just click yes and there we have it. Now we're ready to make the join. I'm going to go into the catalog. Scroll down and you can see the IRB rugby playing numbers and we're going to expand that and we're going to pull in this here and drop it into the table of contents. Now this is actually the excel table that had all the data with playing numbers. But first we need to go back to world country boundaries open the attribute table. And you can see all the fields that we saw earlier in the video are still there. You must leave this table open for when we may make the join. We're going to go back down to this country layer that's got our rugby data. I'm going to open it. Shortly it's going to open over the top of the attribute table which is just done now. If you scroll along here you can see that there's new, new fields like the senior male players one. Now a very important thing to note here is that sometimes you get a "null" figure and that is in this case for Argentina. And that is because there was no data available so that's what I typed in. Now we're going to go to this little box here and is called the table options. And we go to arrange tables. We're going to arrange them by new vertical tab group. And as you can just see the whole arrangement of the country names has rearranged itself according to alphabetical order. I'm going to leave this box open. I'm going to come back to well country boundaries, right click and we're to go on to joins and relates and we'll click join. Now a new box has come up as a dialog box saying join data. Now this first one says choose the field of this layer that the join will be based on. We click on here and I'm going to go by name. Now the reason why I'm going to go by name rather than the country code is because the country codes in this case are different from the ones in the world country boundaries. So we're going to go by name, but when you go by name it's very important that there's no spelling mistakes. Otherwise arcmap will have a hissy fit and the join will not take place. Now we'll click OK. We'll close this and now we're going to look at the result. So right click on world country boundaries. Open the attribute table and we'll scroll along and what you can see is the new fields have just been added and at the very end of it we've got senior male players and you can see that we've got far more fields and we had before. So you've just learned how to join an excel table onto an attribute table in arcmap.

Channel: Darron Gedge's Geography Channel

Views: 157,407

Rating: 4.8555303 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft Excel (Software), Educational, Software Tutorial, How-to (Conference Subject), Arc Map 10.0, GIS, Attribute Table, ArcMap (Software), Darron Gedge, Spreadsheet (File Format Genre), Spreadsheet, ArcGIS, ArcMap, Geography

Id: vedylf2pMjQ

Length: 5min 4sec (304 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2012