As we all know there is no “magic” button in ArcGIS for Desktop that will fix all the issues that you are having.  In my time working in support, however, I have found that exporting data comes quite close and often returns magical results when working with corrupted data. Today we will be looking at using this method to resolve issues with an  X,Y Event Layer.

Have you ever had an event layer show up beautifully in your map, but when exporting it to a shapefile you ran into an issue? Some of these issues could be receiving an error (such as “the data you are exporting contains one or more blob field”), getting a blank attribute table, or finding that not all of your fields are coming through to the shapefile. The steps below work, in most instances, to help resolve this issue. These steps walk you through the process of exporting a table to a DBF, displaying that DBF as an event layer, and then exporting that event layer to a shapefile.

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