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I have a lot of lat lon coordinates in WGS84 format and I'm trying to get those into kilometers so that I'm able to calculate distance.

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marked as duplicate by underdark♦ Feb 13 at 20:45

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If you have them in a delimited text file you can bring them into a GIS program like ArcMap or QGIS, then export them out to a projected coordinate system. If you have them in a spreadsheet ArcMap can read Excel files directly, for QGIS you'll need to save the file as a delimited text file.

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I have ArcMap, but I'm very unfamiliar with it. Could you tell me which coordinate system I should export it to to have the lat lon in kilometers? – user12279 Feb 13 at 20:48
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What part of the world is your data from? You can start with page 7 of this projected_coordinate_systems.pdf and find your area of the world. Or research what others are using (e.g UTM, State Plane, Albers, etc.). Also, see the ArcGIS Desktop help topic Projection basics for GIS professionals for more info on coordinate systems. – ccn Feb 13 at 21:00
As ccn said, find out which coordinate system works for your part of the world. Your best bet will probably be which ever UTM zone applies for the part of the world your data covers, that will give you the coordinates in meters. – HeyOverThere Feb 13 at 21:16

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