Editing Tabular Data Francisco Olivera, Ph.D., P.E. Srikanth Koka Department of Civil Engineering Texas A&M University

Overview Editing Tabular Data Creating New Tabular Data

Edit Mode Add the Editor toolbar by clicking on Tools/Customize/Editor. To make a table editable, click on the Editor/Start Editing in the map. On the start of the editing session, the background of the headers of all editable fields will become white.

Editing Cells To edit individual cells, click on the cell for which you want to change the content, then start overwriting the previous content.

Editing Fields It is not necessary to start an edit session to calculate values. To Calculate [field] Values of all selected rows of a table, right- click on the field header, then on Calculate Values, and then fill the Field Calculator panel. The Field Calculator window can be filled with a string, number, mathematical expression or visual basic expression depending on the field type.

Deleting Fields It is not necessary to start an edit session to delete a field. To delete a field, right- click on the field header, then on the Delete Field button.

Adding Fields To add a new field to a table: click on Options/Add Field in the table and then define the field you want to add. Fields can be numbers, strings, booleans or dates, and they can have different widths and number of decimal digits (if numbers). The field values can be filled one- by-one in an editing session, or all- at-once with Calculate Values.

Adding Rows To add a new row to a table, start an editing session and an empty row will be added to the table. The new row can be updated either by typing or by copying and pasting existing information. Do not add rows to feature attribute tables because they will not be associated to any feature shape.

Overview Editing Tabular Data Creating New Tabular Data

Creating Tables New stand-alone tables (which do not contain geographic data) can be created using ArcCatalog. To create a table, right- click on a folder, then click on New/dBase Table. The new table would be of dbf format and will have two fields: OID and Field1.

Creating Personal GDB Tables New personal geodatabase tables can be created using ArcCatalog. To create a table, right-click on a geodatabase, then click on New/Table. The new table will have one field: OBJECTID.