Tag Archives: Field Calculator
Calculating Geodesic Distance Between Points
Going back to the very early days of ArcGIS there have been geoprocessing tools for calculating distances between features. Tools like Near, Point Distance, and Buffer have been around for many releases, and perform key analysis in a number of common GIS workflows. These distance-measuring tools have always worked well and calculated very accurate distances for features concentrated in a relatively small area (a city, state, or single UTM zone) with an appropriate projected coordinate system that minimizes distance distortion. Unfortunately, for groups of features spread over larger areas (regions, countries, or the world!), or for datasets with a geographic coordinate system, these tools have historically produced results that were less than perfect. Continue reading
Concatenating field values using Calculate Field
A very common task is to concatenate two or more field values into a new field. A classic example of field concatenation occurs with street features. Street features typically have separate fields for the street prefix, street name, and street type, and your task is to concatenate these three field values into another field.
Tips and tricks – accessing feature shape in Calculate Field
With the Calculate Field tool, you can easily create expressions that use some property of a feature’s shape, such as length or area. You can also convert length and area to different units. The illustration below shows calculating the MILES field to the length (in miles) of each line feature.
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