Quick & Dirty: Importing Coordinates into a Simple (and Free) Mapping Program

It’s easy to jump ahead and talk about the exciting things happening today and on the horizon in the geospatial industry. Rich 3D visualizations, complex databases, sophisticated analysis, high-tech data collection equipment, etc. But what about the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who could benefit from just being able to take the first step of importing basic information and coordinates into a mapping program.

Last week, a reader sent me a small dataset of simple lat/lon coordinates in Excel and asked me the best way to import them into some sort of mapping software. My first inclination was to use ArcGIS.com or Google Earth, or something online to avoid having to download, install and maintain software on local computers. But alas, that was not to be. After a quick post to the ArcGIS Resource Center Forum, I quickly found out that ArcGIS.com was not going to work.

“Nelson” responded to my post with the following:

Hmmm….I briefly considered Google Earth, but my experience has not been great with Earth or Earth Pro. It’s ok, but still a little cheesy for my tasted.

When I suggested that my back-up plan was to investigate ArcGIS Explorer, Nelson responded:

ArcExplorer is definately the route you should take.

There are a number of advantages to it:

1) The points can be imported very easily using the GUI.

2) If they ever do decide to shift to a GIS, the layers in ArcExplorer can be shared using Layer Packages or KML files.

3) The Google Earth interface is not as user friendly as ArcExplorer and you also have the ability to change to a number of Basemaps on the fly — ArcGIS Online (Imagery, Topographic, Streets) Bing and OpenStreetMap with 2D/3D rendering.

Lastly, if you yourself are an ArcGIS user, it will probably make your life a little bit easier to work with a format that is well organized and familiar to you.

Cheers,

P.S. At the Federal User Conference, Esri announced there is going to be tons more functionality built in to ArcExplorer over the course of the year.

At that point, I committed to trying ArcGIS Explorer. Please note that I’m the last person to open a manual for this kind of software. I really think it should be straight-forward enough to figure it out in a few minutes. The only reference I used was the online ArcGIS Explorer Desktop FAQ and I accessed the Help file once. Of course, I used the ArcGIS Explorer Forum, which is very good.

Here is a screenshot of the data I had to work with. it was 62 records long, a subset of the actual dataset.

I spent the most time making sure the coordinates were formatted correctly. The original spreadsheet had N/S/E/W to indicators instead of positive and negative. For example, instead of -17 04.201, it was formatted as 17 04.201s, with the “s” denoting south latitude. For your reference, north latitude is positive values, south latitude is negative, east longitude is positive, and west longitude is negative. This had to change. With only 62 records, I could do it by hand in a couple of minutes. If I had to change 600 or 6,000 records, I would have used a more automated method.

The other item I needed to figure out were the attributes. None were provided in the spreadsheet, so I inserted a description number and a title for each point.

Once the spreadsheet was formatted correctly, the rest was very quick and straight-forward. After installing ArcGIS Explorer, this is what you see when you run the program.

If any of you had used ArcExplorer in years past like I did, this is totally different, and refreshing.

I saved the Excel spreadsheet as a CSV file (Comma-delimited text file).

To import into ArcGIS Explorer, simply select Add Content/Text Files.

Once you select the CSV file, it reminds me of importing a CSV file into Excel in that you have to define what each spreadsheet column means, although ArcGIS Explorer does recognize some of the fields automatically. For example, if the top of a column is labeled lat, latitude, y, y-coord, y-coordinate, ArcGIS Explorer automatically assumes the data in the column contains latitude data. The same goes for the longitude and elevation fields. For a good description of importing text files, click here.

First text import screen:

Second text import screen:

After clicking on Finish, the data is imported and displayed in ArcGIS Explorer.

The background imagery is automatically displayed and there are a number of display and analysis options.

To query a particular feature, simply click on it. A window is displayed as follows:

The pop-up window could display a number of things such as hyperlinks, photos, videos, etc.

Once your data is imported, other map data can be added to customize the final to your liking.

Finally, there is a 3D view that I tried, but it didn’t work for me. I suspect it had to do with my laptop video card or video memory, but I would like to have seen it work. That would have been cool to see, especially if a rough terrain surface was visible.

Alas, there is an online version of ArcGIS Explorer I didn’t try. There was some discussion about it at the 2011 Esri Federal User Conference (FedUC) a couple of weeks ago. Click here to see what’s coming in future updates of ArcGIS Explorer Online.

Thanks, and see you next week.

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