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I have 75 coordinates in WGS84 that I brought in from an Excel table. They are now on my imagery basemap spanning across about a half mile on either side of a dirt road in Prescott National Forest in Arizona.

My advisor wants me to get the distances between all 75 points and I first tried to use the measure tool and found that it would take too long to get all the distances that way. I then tried Point Distance and ArcGIS just kept quitting unexpectedly. I imagine there are at least a few more tools in ArcGIS that can do this but am not sure where to go from here. I tried to do this in Excel as well, but I'm not familiar enough with coding to figure that out.

I am just now getting into this program and don't know very much about it.

If it helps, I'm using ArcGIS 10.2.2 on an ASUS desktop at my university. This seems to be the only PC that has ArcGIS installed on it for my use so I hope the problem is not with my computer.

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  • do you have access to the Network Analyst extension?
    – Maksim
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 18:00
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    Before calculating distances, your data needs to convert from the current Geographic Coordinate System to a Projected Coordinate System (e.g. the appropriate UTM, or State Plane for AZ). Use the Project tool (not Define Projection) to convert from WGS84. Hopefully that will enable Point Distance to work -- I'm guessing that it's breaking (uninformatively) because of the projection. (Also note that the Measure tool is going to be unreliable while your data is in WGS84.)
    – Erica
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 18:05
  • If you have access to a database with a spatial datatype you could do a query like the one in this SQL Server sqlfiddle.com/#!6/27a9d/4/0. The distance for this query is in metres and should be quite accurate.
    – MickyT
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 19:41

2 Answers 2

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If you have the data in Excel you'd probably do better doing the calculation in Excel!

The Haversine formula (find it here: http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html) will give you the distance between two pairs of latitude and longitude.

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If you want to do all the calculations in Excel this set of Excel UDFs may proof helpful https://github.com/tdjastrzebski/Vincenty-Excel Check out VincentyInvDistance() function

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