How To Change Coordinate System Of Shapefile In Arcgis

At that place are many ways of representing locations. I of the nigh common uses athwart latitude and longitude coordinates to specify the location of a point. These Geographic coordinates may exist expressed in several unlike notations, including Decimal Degrees (DD), Degrees Decimal Minutes (DDM), and Degrees Minutes and Seconds (DMS). The formula for converting Degree Minutes and Seconds to Decimal Degrees is discussed in the ArcGIS 10 Aid. Another common method is to employ a projected coordinate system and Ten and Y coordinate pairs, that is, two sets of numbers in a planar Cartesian arrangement.

Gridded systems, like Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM), United States National Filigree (USNG), Armed forces Grid Reference System (MGRS) split up the world into zones which are projected and then overlaid with 1 or more grids. Within the grids, point locations are specified by their position East and North the zone origin or the southeast corner of the jail cell. For USNG and MGRS the numeric values of the northing and easting tin can vary from 1 to 5 digits, depending on the precision of the location (they must both use the same number of digits) and then the values are concatenated.

2 less often used systems, the Global Surface area Reference System (Bloke) and Geographic Reference System (GEOREF), divide the world into polygonal areas based on unlike sets of nested grids and encode locations every bit a cord of filigree ID values.

Philadelphia coordinates Each of these ways of representing a location results in different strings of characters with a variety of formats. This table shows the coordinate representation for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the US (75° 9' 18.382" West longitude past 39° 59' 0.637" North latitude) in each of these systems. This is not an exhaustive list of the delimiters and hemisphere indicators that are used in each system.

ArcGIS 10 tin can convert coordinates expressed in each of these systems into the others, and provides ways of displaying and accepting coordinate input in most of them.

Displaying Coordinates

Status bar coordinate display Y'all can see the coordinate value for a place on a map in the ArcMap condition bar, at the bottom correct of the application. The default coordinate format in the status bar is based on the units of the first layer added to the map, often feet, meters, or degrees of longitude/latitude.

Status bar showing MGRS

You can change the coordinate display to use any of these systems (except GARS and GEOREF) by right-clicking Layers in the table of contents and selecting Properties. On the General tab, under Units, you lot tin can select the type of coordinates y'all would like to see, for example MGRS.

Go To XY Coordinates

Go To XY tool location If you have a set of coordinates and you lot want to find their location on the map, you can use the Go To XY tool. Go To XY tool dialog box

Open the tool from the toolbar, and so select a coordinate format. Blazon (or paste) the coordinates into the text box and click i of the buttons to Pan to, Zoom to, Flash, Add a Point, Add together a Point Labeled with Coordinates, or Add a Callout.

The Become To XY tool likewise keeps a record of recent locations, which you can return to past clicking the Recent button and selecting the location. Yous tin can use this to manually catechumen coordinates from ane format to some other. To exercise so, select your input coordinate notation, input your coordinates and pan to the location. Then select your new output format and select the coordinates from the Contempo button.

Find MGRS coordinates

Find tool locations If you piece of work with MGRS coordinates, the Find tool has an MGRS Locator that works similar the Go To XY tool, just provides additional capabilities tailored to the MGRS system.

Find tool dialog box

To use these, open up the Find tool on the Tools toolbar. In the Observe tool dialog box, click the Locations tab, select MGRS from the locator drop-downwards listing. So type (or paste) the coordinate into the MGRS box and click Find.

Find tool options

The tool will return a listing of location matches (in our example there should only exist one). If yous correct-click on the coordinate you have various options for marking the location.

So what's different well-nigh the MGRS Locator?

The locator has options for matching shortened MGRS coordinates when you work in the same Grid Zone Designator (GZD). It has options to pull the GZD and 100,000 meter square identifier from the electric current map heart, a default value, or use the concluding one used. This is user-friendly if you piece of work in the aforementioned GZD over and over again, yous can type "8675725939" or "VK8675725939" rather than "18SVK8675725939", which will save yous a few actress key strokes when entering your coordinates.

Converting Tables of Coordinates

Table of coordinates There may be times when y'all have a lot of coordinates that yous need to convert to some other system. If you have the coordinates in a table, you can convert all of them by running the Convert Coordinate Note (CCN) geoprocessing tool.

For example, you might convert a table of longitude and latitude values in decimal degrees (DD) to MGRS.

CCN tool dialog

With the CCN tool y'all can catechumen between DD, DDM, DMS, UTM, USNG, MGRS, Gars, and GEOREF.

The tool takes your table of coordinates and converts them to indicate features with an attribute containing the new output notation.

It is important to annotation that the CCN tool is a geoprocessing tool and represents a single-focus procedure of converting a table of coordinates; its only part is to do the conversion. The output point features do non take the same fields as the input tabular array.

If you want the output points to have all of the attributes of the input table (in add-on to the new annotation field) you must put the tool in a Model Architect model that uses the Join Field tool to attach the original fields.

The model would look something like this:

CCN with Join