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I am trying to aggregate my data points to the polygons so that I could find out how many points I actually have in each polygon, and then export the data contained within each polygon to further look at the data properties as they pertain to each polygon.

Thanks for your help!

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Posted you image. Please add any description or formatting where needed. – radek May 6 '12 at 16:21
Summarizing a spatial join of the polygons to the points is the standard (and often most efficient) solution. – whuber♦ May 7 '12 at 15:22
I would follow whubers advice and use the spatial join tool. Have the points as the Target Features and the Polygons as the Join features. This will grab all the attribute data from the polygons. Make there's a unique ID on the polygons as this will help in analyzing the stats of each one, a simple summary statistics calcualtion will give you some good info on what going on. – dchaboya Aug 8 '12 at 23:23
One other thing, the spatial join tool is a little buggy when a large number of features are being processed. If it's buggy for you, you may end up with a lot of null values. There is an SP5 patch that fixes the problem. – dchaboya Aug 9 '12 at 12:34

3 Answers

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What you want is a spatial intersection of your polygons and points. You can use the Select By Location tool if you only have a few features and would like to export separate layers, or you could run the Intersect tool to output a new point layer to which you can add the intersecting polygon ID/name as an attribute, which can then be used to sort the data by polygon.

Since you mentioned exporting the data to Excel for analysis, I would run the Intersect tool and then export the resulting attribute table.

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Using Identity Toolbox maybe can meet with your need. The point layer as the Input Feature and the polygon layer as the Identity Feature.The polygon's attribute with be contain in the point's table ,so your can found out how many points in a polygon.

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I basically want all of the point data to be attributed to each polygon so I can take it into excel, separate it out per polygon and perform data analysis. Made up example: say each polygon is a state and the point data represents a person in that state. Well with the "person" data, there is also their age. I want to know how many people in each state AND then give age categories, sort the state population into them and then look at for the state say with the oldest people.... etc does that make sense? Thank you! – and_by May 6 '12 at 16:31
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Hawth's Tools is a very handy (free) ArcMap plugin which automates many similar commands, including Count Points in Polygons.

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