Exercise 8: Creating & Editing Shapefiles

You are the Water Management Specialist for Marathon County. You want to make yourself a map of the county to help familiarize yourself with it. The map will include watersheds, roads, rivers, and lakes.

Step 1 – Open an existing project.

From the File menu, choose Open Project. Double-click the directory folders and navigate to c:\esritrn\arcview\wiscexer. Open the project wiscexer8.apr.

When the project window opens, you will be in the Marathon view and you see a view containing a theme of the state and several other themes.

Step 2 – Query the theme to select features

Because you are the Water Management Specialist for just Marathon County, you want to create a theme containing only that county. To do this, you will create a selection set, then convert the selected feature into a shapefile and a new theme.

With the theme County Boundaries active, click the Query Builder button.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 1 The Query Builder dialog box displays. You will use it to select Marathon County based on county name.

In the Fields list, scroll down to [Name] and double-click on it. Click on the “=” button, and then in the Values list, double-click on “Marathon”. This is the first part of your query and it should look like this:

To perform the selection, click the New Set button.

ArcView selects the county satisfying our query. You will use this county to create a new theme.

Close the Query Builder dialog box.

The items satisfying your query will appear highlighted yellow.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 2 Step 3 – Convert selected feature to a shapefile.

From the Theme menu, select Convert to Shapefile.

In the Convert parcels dialog box, move to c:/esritrn/arcview/student, then change the file name to marathon.shp. (This is the name of the shapefile ArcView will create). Click OK.

Marathon County is converted to a shapefile and stored in the student directory. You will use this new shapefile to create a new theme.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 3 Choose Yes to add the shapefile as a theme to the view.

The new theme, marathon.shp, is added to the view.

Turn off the County Boundaries theme by clicking its check box. Click on the check box next to the marathon.shp theme to turn it on.

Step 4 – Clip a theme based on another theme

Turn on the Watershed theme, by clicking on check box in front of it.

As you can see, all the watershed for the entire state are displayed. You are just interested in the watersheds of Marathon County.

Go to the File menu and click on Extensions.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 4 The Extensions dialog box will appear. Place a check in front of Geoprocessing. Click OK.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 5 Now if you go to the View menu, you will see another option available to you – Geoprocessing Wizard. Click on it.

The Geoprocessing Wizard dialog box appears.

You can perform six different operations on themes with Geoprocessing Wizard. Information about each operation is displayed in the box on the right and more information is available by clicking on the More About box.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 6 You are going to Clip one theme based on another.

Click on Clip one theme based on another and then Next.

First you need to select your input theme. In this case it is Watersheds – the watershed theme.

If you look at “clipping” like using cookie cutters to cut out the shapes you want, the input theme is the cookie dough – what you will making the shape out of.

The polygon overlay theme or clip theme is marathon.shp.

Continuing with the cookie cutters, the polygon overlay theme is your cookie cutter, what you want the new theme to look like.

The output file is where you want to save the new shapefile.

Click on the Open File button.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 7 Maneuver to c:/esritrn/arcview/student. Enter wtrshd_marathon for the File Name. Click OK.

Then click Finish in the Geoproccessing Wizard dialog box.

A new shapefile is created called wtrshd_marathon that the contains watersheds found only in Marathon County.

Turn off Watersheds by clicking the check box in front of it. Turn on the new shapefile by clicking its check box. Turn on the other themes in the view as well. They are streams, rivers, lakes and roads themes which have already been clipped to Marathon County.

You can play with the legend editor to make presentation that visually pleasing to yourself.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 8 Step 5 – Close the project

Click on the Project window to make it active (or choose wiscexer8.apr from the Window menu). From the File menu, choose Close Project.

Click No when ArcView asks if you want to save your project.

Wisconsin ArcView Exercise #8 - 04/06/18 9