Exporting Data: Creating New Shapefiles from Existing Data

STEP
1

Open ArcMap and Add your background data. I have cities, rivers, interstates and states in
my map viewall located on the hard drive in the pre-installed data folders.

STEP
2

Next, you need to select the point, line or polygon that you want to have in a separate shape
file.
Remember that you can select features in many ways:
You can use the select tool .
You can open the attribute table and select a row or rows of data.
You can query the attribute table by attribute or
location.
Also, you can give ArcMap more selection parameters by
clicking the selection menu and then choose options.
I find myself opening the attribute table or querying more often
to select items.

STEP
3

Lets open the attribute table for cities.shp.

Right-click cities in the Table of Contents and choose Open Attribute Table. You should
have a window like this one.

Exporting Data: Creating New Shapefiles from Existing Data

STEP
4

Now we can begin selecting data. I find it helpful to organize the data. Perhaps by State or
City name in this case is best. To do that, click once on the column name (the part in gray
at the top of the column). The column will turn turquoise. Now right-click the name of the
highlighted column. Choose
the method youd like it to
sort, ascending or descending.
Im partial to alphabetical order
so I chose ascending. Then, it
was easy for me to find my city.
Now select your feature(s).
Click the far left column in the
row of the item you want to export. It will highlight in turquoise. (If you want to select
multiple item, hold the CTRL key down and as you click additional items.)
In the example, I chose Birmingham, AL. You can see it highlighted dynamically on the map
view as its selected in the attribute table.

STEP
5

Close the attribute table.

Right-click cities in the Table of Contents.
Select Data, then Export data
Click the yellow folder icon in the Export Data
window. Navigate to the folder where you want to
save your shapefile. Name your shapefile.
Click Save. Then back in the Export Data window,
Click OK.
ArcMap will ask you if you want to add this file to
your view, click Yes.
Its now added to your TOC as an individual file!

Exporting Data: Creating New Shapefiles from Existing Data

STEP
6

Turn off cities.

Symbolize your new file and zoom it to start your analysis!

Thats all there is to it!