Creating point features from tabular data

If you have a file of tabular data that includes real-world coordinate locations, you can bring that tabular data into ArcMap and create new point features from it.

Suppose you are a biologist who has been out in the field taking water temperature readings at different locations along a stream. You used a GPS to record the locations where you sampled. The GPS created a text file of the latitude and longitude coordinates for each location. In ArcMap, you can add that file of coordinate locations to a map document and display the sample locations as points in an event layer.

An event layer looks and acts like any other layer in the Table of Contents—you can turn it on and off, symbolize it, and query it. However, features in an event layer are not permanently stored on disk. They reside in your computer's memory and can be saved only as part of the map document. To permanently save the point features in an event layer, you can export the event layer to a geodatabase feature class or to a shapefile.

You can create point features by adding x,y coordinates stored in a table as an event layer to ArcMap. To permanently store the point features on disk, you can export the event layer to a geodatabase feature class.

You can create an event layer from any kind of coordinates—latitude and longitude coordinates (in decimal degrees) or x,y coordinates. The x and y (or latitude and longitude) coordinates must be stored in separate fields or separated by a delimiter such as a comma. Field names cannot contain spaces, special characters, or dashes (e.g., x-coord).

When adding the file to ArcMap, you specify the fields that contain the coordinates as well as the coordinate system in which the data is stored.