2

I'm using ArcMap 10.3. (Fairly new to GIS in general!)

I have two polygon shapefiles - school district and council districts - where the polygons overlap irregularly (meaning a school district can intersect with several council districts and vice versa). There is no key field to link them in any way.

I'd like to create a table that relates the two--really for analysis outside of ArcMap. Someone asked this for QGIS, with some passing references to ArcMap here: Creating many-to-many table from intersection between two polygon layers in QGIS?

But I'm hoping for some direction on ArcMap. Seems like it should be doable.

Improve this question
3
  • Welcome to GIS SE! As a new user please take the tour to learn about our focused Q&A format. Did you try some of the suggestions in your linked Q&A using the equivalent ArcGIS tools? – Midavalo♦ Mar 24 '17 at 14:16
  • The OP there made reference to relates in ArcMap, which I dismissed. But looking again, I see that he landed on using Union/Intersect in QGIS. Will look into the equivalent. (Missed that!) I see there are tools with those names in ArcMap as well and will look into whether one of those can help. Thanks. – s_bklyn Mar 24 '17 at 14:40
  • If you have an ArcGIS Desktop Advanced license you could try using the Generate Near Table tool. This tool creates a new table that links two feature classes based on their proximity to each other. – Midavalo♦ Mar 24 '17 at 14:46
3

I ended up using the Intersect tool (similar to the ultimate QGIS answer in the post I linked to). For those who, like me, appreciate some hand-holding:

  1. Opened Intersect tool (ArcToolbox>Analysis Tools>Overlay>Intersect)
  2. For Input, selected both polygon shapefiles (left other options as-is); after running, the new feature was added to my map and saved to file
  3. Exported data to Excel file (Arctoolbox>Conversion Tools>Table to Excel)
  4. For Input, browsed to intersect shapefile created in step 2

Done! Thanks Midavalo for encouraging proper diligence in investigating ArcMap's version of the QGIS tool.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.