Creating duplicate records based on overlapping polygons

Question

I have a shapefile of all the counties in one state, I also have a shapefile of a grid map dividing the entire state into 1-mile grids. I need to come up with a list of which grids are in which county, a problem made difficult by the fact that many grids overlap multiple counties. There are 41,000 grids and 133 counties.

What would I like as an output is a shapefile where each grid (each record) has a county assigned to it with grids that overlap multiple counties being repeated as many times as necessary.

I am using ArcMap 10.2.1 with a basic license.

Answer 1

Use the Intersect tool with counties and grid as inputs:

Computes a geometric intersection of the input features. Features or portions of features which overlap in all layers and/or feature classes will be written to the output feature class.

The output feature class table will have one row for each combination of overlapping county and grid