What shapes are inside another shapefile

Question

I am working with some shapefiles and ArcMap. I am new to both of them.

I have a shapefile that contains all of the precincts of Arizona and I also have 9 different shapefiles each of them holds a District. In the real world each district holds multiple districts my current goal is to find out to which district each precinct belongs to. I learned that ArcMap has a lot of tools that I can use to do the processing of shapefiles. However I am not sure what tool to use or how I can accomplish this.

Each precinct has a unique id and each district also has a unique id.

Answer 1

There are a few ways to do this. You didn't mention your license level, but this should work at any level. Try:

1. Merge your 9 district shapefiles into one shapefile
2. Intersect the merged shapefile with the Precincts shapefile. Make sure you keep the default 'join all attributes' and you should see what precinct your district is in, in the resultant shapefile attribute table.