Making a new polygon shapefile in ArcMap

hello my name is Monika noon I'm the GIS manager at Conservation International today I'm going to show you how to create a new polygon shape file in arcmap for desktop first you'll want to open arcmap and right-click on this empty space on the toolbar I like to have a few toolbars open the draw editor layout and standard toolbars will use all of these today also ensure that the table of contents that you see here on the left is open and I'm also going to select catalog just pin that here for future reference now I'm going to add a base map so I can actually see what it's available and I'm going to add a natural Earth boundary layer as well on top of my base map now to make sure I can see I'll select hollow by clicking here on this box and then I'm going to select this magnifying glass with a plus sign so I can easily zoom in to the area when I look at today I'm going to look at some communities near Mount Kenya to create a shape file just right-click on this folder that I already have with some Kenya data in it so right clicking selecting new good this additional set of options I'll select shape file this gives me the option to name my shape file I'm just gonna abbreviate some things polygons cuz I want to draw the boundary of an area I'm just going to give it this geographic coordinate system WGS 1984 if you know it you can but here there's just some drop-down menus that you can go through oh my global one okay now you can see I have this shape file here but there's no information yet so I need to start editing with the editor toolbar say I want to edit this shape file and you'll see that these have now been highlighted they were grayed out before I started editing so I can create features and I just click here to make sure you know you're editing the right shape file go through and click you want to click at a moderate pace if you click too fast it may actually stop editing now I double click you can see this has been highlighted I can either say hit save or I can hit stop editing stop editing if I had hit that before saving it would have given me the option to save there now if you want to continue adding polygons wouldn't have hit stop editing you would have just continued going on create boundaries let's say there's Mary over here I want to look at two and you have that there now let's say I didn't like that last point I made so I could actually select edit vertices and because that was already selected could have moved that slightly now I hit stop editing it's realized I hadn't saved that yeah when I say that now I have those polygons now to send out that file if I wanted to send it to a colleague would actually go to that data file that I saved it on if you don't remember go back to catalog and just kind of follow your tracks I have it in the D folder data Kenya data Africa Kenya and you'll see that I have several files now this has been locked because it's open currently in arcmap so if I tried to compress these now it would give me this this error one way of getting around it is I'm selecting that first file selecting shift selecting all the files and then hitting ctrl + while holding ctrl remove that file from my selections so again you can either hold ctrl click on each folder you want at each file just make sure that you have all of these supplementary files selected except for the locked one now I can compress it I have this it's 2 KB and I can use that as an attachment in an email and send it out to a colleague so they know exactly the boundary I'm looking at that's all I have for today thank you for joining

Channel: TrendsEarth Toolbox

Views: 51,174

Rating: 4.8457298 out of 5

Keywords: ArcMap, Natural Earth, vector, polygon, digitize, ArcCatalog, shapefile, basemap

Id: HBY5ASCToIg

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2018