I have a table of proposals which includes a field for counties that the proposal will affect. Unfortunately, the COUNTY field has multiple counties in it, separated by a comma. (Pic is from an excel attempt).
What I want to do is find a way to create a duplicate rows so that each only has one county in the county field. (The end result is that I need to have a map of counties that will be symbolized by the number of proposals affecting them.)
So the highlighted Proposal 4 above would turn into something like this:
Then I can join to a county shapefile and easily get a count. It's simple enough in Excel to split a cell into columns and then transpose them into rows, however I need to pull the additional data from the other fields as well. There are 1500 rows, so I need an automated way to do this either in ArcMap or through Excel.
Or perhaps I'm going about this all wrong and there is a way to relate the table to a county shapefile based on a comma separated field?
Any help would be appreciated!
tough one, but if your intent is to get summaries and the like, you might want to consider that queries can parse substrings from a string. Consider your Counties field, if you wanted to get all the records that are associated with Bay county, your query would be
Counties Like '%Bay%'
or variants such as
Counties = 'Bay' (explicit check)
(Counties = 'Bay') Or (Counties Like '%Bay,') (as above, but check for an immediately following comma)
Setting up queries to run through a Summarize might be easier that trying to reinvent/reformat a database structure which is being a bit stretched beyond its original purpose/vision.
I thought a very similar question was recently answered on GeoNet, but I can't find it at the moment. In the meantime, a similar question has been answered on StackExchange: arcgis desktop - Splitting strings into new rows, retaining geometry - Geographic Information System... .
I will post back if I find the GeoNet question I am thinking about, or if I come up with my own solution.
That looks about what I'm trying to do. When I get a chance to try it out, I will post an update here. Thanks!