Get Points in a selected polygon

Question

Anyone know of a way to be able to create a new shapefile of points that sit within a polygon, without having to trace along the boundary line to select all thousands of points?

I used the "Count Points in Polygons" tool thinking it would create a point shapefile with the number of points within the polygon I had selected but I was wrong. It actually made an additional polygon shapefile with one feature telling me the amount of points in this location.

Answer 1

Use the Clip option in Vector... Geoprocessing Tools... Clip to clip a point layer to a polygon layer. You'll get a new point layer with just the points that are in the polygons of the polygon layer. That's what you want isn't it?

Answer 2

If I understand this correctly, you could just apply a spatial selection and export the results.

1. Add both layers to ArcGIS
2. Select Selection>Select By Location...
3. Set Selection Method>select features from
4. Target layer(s): your points
5. Source Layer: your polygon
6. Click Apply
7. Right click your points in the Table of Contents
8. Select Data>Export Data...
9. Choose Export:Selected features
10. Name your new .shp and click OK

You could append this process by choosing a specific polygon (or set of polygons) and spatially selecting your points that only reside within that polygon selection.