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Creating a link to an Excel spreadsheet in ArcCatalog 9.1
Creating a link to an Excel spreadsheet requires creating an OLE DB connection to that
spreadsheet. But first, you have to do a little work on the spreadsheet. Please note that
ArcGIS 9.2 reads Excel spreadsheets directly. This document is for ArcGIS 9.1.
1. Make sure all of the column names in Excel are less than 30 characters, have no
spaces or special characters and don’t start with numbers.
2. Select the rows/columns that you are interested in and create a name for them
(“Insert”/”Name”/”Define”)
Now, you can close Excel and go to ArcCatalog to build the connection.
1. In ArcCatalog, open the Database Connections folder and double-click the “Add
OLE DB Connection” entry.
2. Choose the Microsoft ODBC Provider for ODBC drivers and click Next.
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3. Click the “Use Connection String” button and then the “Build” button to create a
database connection to Excel.
4. First, you have to create a Data Source Name for the new connection. Click the
“New” button to do this.
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5. Choose “Driver do Microsoft Excel (*.xls) and click Next.
6. Type in a new name for your data source. This will be the name of the connection
to the Excel spreadsheet (so you would normally name it after the spreadsheet).
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7. Now that you have a DSN set up, you have to tell Windows which Excel
spreadsheet to connect to. Click the “Select Workbook” button to do this and
browse to select your spreadsheet.
8. Click “OK” several times to get back to the “Data Link Properties” dialog box. In
the “Data Link Properties” dialog box, click the “Test Connection” button to see
if your connection worked. If so, you are done! If not, call for help! ☺
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