To see these items in ArcCatalog, you must add their file extensions to the file types list. While you can't work directly with these items in ArcGIS for Desktop, you can manage them using ArcCatalog. In addition to shapefiles and tables, ArcView GIS users work with project files, legend files, and Avenue scripts.

If a table contains information describing spatial locations, such as x,y,z coordinates or street addresses, you can create a shapefile representing those locations with tools available in ArcCatalog. You can join attributes stored in a dBASE table or text file to the features in a shapefile in a layer's Properties dialog box on the Joins & Relates tab. Text files can be deleted, but their contents are read-only in ArcCatalog. When text files contain comma- and tab-delimited values, you can see their contents in the ArcCatalog table view and join them to geographic features. However, on the Options dialog box, you can choose which of these file types should be represented as text files and which should not be shown in the Catalog tree. tab appear in ArcCatalog as text files by default. You can also see the dBASE file (that may be associated with a shapefile).Īll files that have the file extensions. The workspace containing shapefiles may also contain dBASE tables, which can store additional attributes that can be joined to a shapefile's features.īelow is an example of how shapefiles appear in ArcCatalog. Geographic features in a shapefile can be represented by points, lines, or polygons (areas).

Importing shapefiles and dBASE tables to geodatabase feature classes and tablesĪ shapefile is a simple, nontopological format for storing the geometric location and attribute information of geographic features.

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