On May 3, 2011, at 3:36 PM, Varun saraf wrote:

> Hi Puneet,
> 
> Thanks a lot for the prompt reply. I tried using Excel 2007 and was
> not able to re-save the dbf file after editing. Also, I am having DBF
> files with about a million records and Excel tends to hang for these
> operations.


Now you tell us ;-). My sense is that most gui-based tools will choke on 
million+ rows. You might well want to "upgrade" to a Pg/PostGIS solution at 
some point, but I realize that is not what you are asking for... (also, I 
believe the most recent Excel versions might have lost the DBF translation 
capabilities -- I am not an Excel person, so I can't confirm... besides, I use 
Macs, and Excel is most likely hobbled on Macs anyway).


> Is there some tool other than Excel which can do these
> operations?


I remember using Perl and XBase.pm to do this. It was really very quick and 
trivial, but it was a long time ago. Choose your language of choice. Try R.




> 
> Thanks,
> Varun
> 
> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Mr. Puneet Kishor <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On May 3, 2011, at 3:19 PM, Varun saraf wrote:
>> 
>>> ..Is there a DBF editor out
>>> there that can be used to import the fields from any external data
>>> source into the shapefile attribute DBF without affecting the
>>> structure? I looked for a lot but they do not have the capability of
>>> doing a JOIN based on a common field and pulling data into the
>>> shapefile DBF automatically.
>> 
>> Just use MS-Excel or any program that can open up and write DBF. As long as 
>> you are careful to not change the number of rows, just add additional 
>> columns, and make sure the column names are not changed, and follow the 
>> various DBF limitations, you should be ok. Make sure to keep a backup of the 
>> original DBF in case things go ka-pow!
>> 
>> Since the DBF data and the geometry are in separate files, there is no issue 
>> with adding more attributes provide you follow the care noted above.
>> ..
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Puneet.

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