Introducing Geographic Information Systems with ArcGIS: A Workbook Approach to Learning GIS, 3rd Edition

The Summarizing Procedure

You can’t get much out of the other statistics, because the numbers in MINOR1 are “nominal,” meaning that the numbers are used just as names. Under these circumstances, you can’t do any mathematical operations other than to compare for “equal” or “not equal.” Even the histogram (Frequency Distribution) doesn’t give any definitive information because pairs of adjacent numbers (e.g., 34 and 35) are clumped together in the graph, so this only tells you the total number, not how many polygons are of type 34 and how many of type 35. You can use Summarize to tell you how many polygons of each MINOR1 type there are.

____ 3. Dismiss the Statistics of cole_soil_polygon window. Click the field MINOR1 to highlight its column. Right-click the field name. Click Summarize. The Summarize window has three input boxes. The first, at the top, should indicate that MINOR1 is the field to summarize. Ignore the second one (in the middle). The third and last should indicate that a table named Sum_Output will be placed in the default geodatabase. To change both the name and location click the Browse Folder button and locate.

___IGIS-Arc_YourInitials.

Pounce. Change the name to Summary_MINOR1 in the Name box. From the drop-down box Save as Type, change it from File and Personal Geodatabase tables to dBase Table. Click Save. Click OK. When the Summarize Completed window appears, agree to add the table to the map. In the T/C, note the appearance of Summary_MINOR1 and the fact ...