How to get rid of double labels on ArcGIS 10

Question

I'm displaying several point shapefiles. I want them all labeled with the field "ident" which is a 3 digit number starting at 001. Two of the three shapefiles show the labels correctly but the 3rd one shows a double label for each point. Instead of just saying "027" it says "027027". In the Layer properties window, I tried unchecking the box that says "Label features in this layer" but this removes the labels completely, then when I recheck "Label features" in the menu that comes when I right click the layer in the table of contents, the double layers re-appear.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Molly

Answer 1

Have you confirmed that there are not stacked points located in the third layer? If you have 2 points that are exactly in the same location and then default label them (both), you will end up with 2 labels that are labeled in the upper left and upper right, but looks like the text is being duplicated from one label point.

In the example below, you can see that 2020 & 2023 are single points and single labels. 2011 & 5367 are 2 points stacked perfectly on top of each other and therefore give the look that you describe. 2008 & 5355 shows a good example of "nearly stacked" points and labels that, if you zoomed out far enough, would eventually look like they were "stacked" and would eventually give you the "double label" effect.

To fix this, you would either need to eliminate the stacked points, or you could play with "Buffer" setting on the "Conflict Detection" tab of the label "Placement Properties" (this works is 9.3, not sure if the 10 dialog is the same).

Answer 2

You don't say wether the 'ident' field for the 3rd shapefile contains the double problem in the attribute table. If it does then you could manipulate the shapefile's associated DBF in excel using the 'text to columns' feature to get rid of the extra digits. Hope this helps.

Damien

Answer 3

You might check your label expressions to see if some reason it has set it to [ident][ident]. I'm not sure how this would be turned on.

Hope that helps, David

Answer 4

I had a similar problem recently with just a few of my points.

It came down to the fact that I had excel open and while copy pasting from a cell to my attribute field.

If I didn't double click and select the text. (in other words if I just single clicked in a cell and didn't see the text selected [just an outline around the cell]).

Then in arcgis after pasting it looked correct in the attribute value.

However each time you label it shows it twice.

When you select it from arcmap and paste it into notepad you could then see "thestring[]thestring".

Very weird and hard to find. but it was an easy fix.

Answer 5

If this doesn't work for everyone there might be another cause: I had stupidly pasted a label twice into an attribute table cell (but it was only visible there once) and it labeled twice on the map. I only figured it out when I realized other fields labeled properly. Doh.