Cartographer's Toolkit

I’ve had several clients ask me how to do this lately so I figured I’d write up a quick how-to. There are probably a myriad of ways to do this. Outlined here is just one of those ways.

Each time I’ve been asked about this the situation has been that a client has gone onto Google Earth, eyeballed some locations and jotted down the latitude and longitude pairs for those locations. Then they’ve tried to import these into ArcMap and had the points show up in very unexpected places. The issue is, of course, about getting the correct projection. Don’t forget that latitude is your y value and longitude is your x value.

Google Earth uses a Simple Cylindrical projection, WGS84 datum. Once you have your points in a table, import the table into your ArcMap project. Then…

2) Go to Tools–>Add XY Data, choose the table from the drop-down list
3) Put the x coordinate in the x field drop-down list, same with the y
4) Click Edit for the coordinate system
5) Click Select
6) Geographic Coordinate Systems
7) World
8) WGS 1984.prj
9) Click okay
10) right click the layer that it just created in the table of contents, click Data, then Export Data and save it as a shapefile. This makes it into a permanent shapefile.