Transferring new features from ArcGIS to Excel

Objective: Transfer new features into your linked Excel table.

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Prerequisite

A connection between an ArcGIS feature-class or table and an Excel table must be available.

If you have not yet applied a connection, you have the following three possibilities for doing so:

The same workflows to establish a connection are available from

the Excel side, too:

To transfer new features with the GISconnector for Excel from ArcGIS to your linked Excel table, you must activate this function in the Connection settings once before separately for each data transfer direction. If your ArcGIS data set contains feature geometries, with version 1.2 of the GISconnector for Excel you can only transfer new features from ArcGIS to Excel. If your ArcGIS feature is a table, subject to your settings in the Connection options and the Columns/fields setting, you can also transfer new data sets from Excel to ArcGIS. To do this, there is no requirement for an editing session in ArcGIS.

1. Start an Editing session in ArcGIS for the relevant layer and create a new feature.

2. Click on the button

"Transfer data".

3. The GISconnector for Excel now transfers all data, including the new feature, to Excel. Under Columns/fields, you can deactivate all columns for the transfer from ArcGIS to Excel. The new feature will nevertheless correctly be transferred to Excel because a new GCEX_ID is always produced for this feature, both in ArcGIS and also in Excel.

If you have assigned a formula to one of your Excel columns, the GISconnector copies the formula for the new feature/object from above, so that your formulas do not have to be copied down manually. (This works with all formats; e.g., also with drop-down lists)

4. You can now apply attributes to your new feature in Excel and transfer the attributes again at any time to ArcGIS. When doing this, be sure you have activated the columns in which you made inputs

in your Excel sheet so that they are transferred to ArcGIS.

Performance hints for transferring new features

Edit very large data sets

If you are editing a large feature class, to improve the transfer speed it is advizable to transfer your new feature/object to Excel using the function “Transfer selected data”. The feature just created remains selected immediately afterwards. If you now click on the button

"Transfer selected data", only the feature just created is transferred, which will happen very quickly.

Inserting or copying a multitude of features into an existing feature class

If you would like to copy a large number of features from a different feature-class, to insert them into your GISconnector feature-class and then to export these new features to Excel, you can greatly improve the speed of the transfer by:

stopping your ArcGIS editing session before the transfer, and
closing the associated attribute table in ArcGIS, should it have been left open.

Further tips for Performance optimization.