Getting attribute table into Excel spreadsheet? [duplicate]

Question

How can I get an attribute table into an excel spreadsheet?

I don't have the tool for that because I am using ArcGIS Desktop 10.0.

Answer 1

One easy way to do this in any version of ArcGIS is to save the layer as a shapefile (if it's not already in that format.)

1. Right click the layer and select Data > Export Data
2. Browse, select name for file
3. Save.

Now the easy part. In Excel go to open a file. Navigate to the directory you saved the shapefile in. You will see various files all named the same but with different file types.

Open the file ending in .dbf This is a database file containing your attribute table.

CAUTION: although you may find it extremely tempting to edit the data in Excel then re-save it, this will often corrupt your shapefile. Use Save-As to save the data in another format (such as CSV or xlsx).

---

Alternatively, ArcGIS 10.2 provides several methods for this. You can read about them here.

I personally am fond of exporting to CSV as it makes the data extremely portable to all kinds of programs.

1. Open your attribute table
2. Click the table options arrow
3. Select export
4. When selecting where to save you can choose file type like xlsx or csv

Finally, a third option would be to use an open source tool like QGIS to extract the data. I keep a copy of qgis on hand for the occasional task that is better in QGIS than ArcGIS. (Or free in QGIS and paid in ArcGIS)

Answer 2

Have a look at the Export Table to File tool, which is available with the free edition of the XTools Pro productivity suite for ArcGIS. Before Excel to Table was available natively in ArcMap, I used this tool frequently.

Answer 3

This will write the file "Summary.txt" (which can be open in excel). It'll take the attribute 'Area' from the VegMap shapefile.

txtfilename = 'Summary.txt'
shapefileFC = 'VegMap'
field       = 'Area'
with open(txtfilename,'w') as f:
    with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(shapefileFC, field) as Cursor:
        for row in Cursor:
            f.write('{0}\n'.format(Area))