Sorry about the long time between posts. I’m not giving up on blogging, but, believe it or not, it does take a lot of time….

Anyhow, I’ve been playing a little with the Analysis > Analyze Geometry command. I can’t say I use it all the time, so I’m not sure when this changed. It may have been a long time ago. I’ve always found it hard to get lat/long coordinates from my state plane coordinates. Yes, I can do this one off by just clicking on the map and getting a coordinate readout from the “Precision Coordinates” dialog, but what if I wanted to have lat/long for 10,000 points. That was much harder.

You can do this with functional attributes. In fact, I posted an article on www.geomediawiki.org on how to do it. It was actually copied for the most part out of the GeoMedia online help. However you can also do this with the Analyze Geometry command.

1. Launch the command (Analysis > Analyze Geometry)
2. Choose a point feature class. If you have lines or polygons, use the CENTERPOINT functional attribute to create points from the line/area geometry.
3. When you select the point feature class, you will see the “Analysis Options” dialog populate. In the dialog you will see “Geographic Coordinate” and “Projection Coordinate”
   
4. If you check “Geographic” you will get lat/long. If you check “Projection” you’ll typically get easting/northing. NOTE: you can set the output coordinate format in the “Units and Formats…” dialog in the same Analyze Geometry dialog.
5. For points you have options for Azimuth, Bearing, Geographic Coordinates, Projection Coordinates, and Height. Height assumes you have the Z elevation populated in your geometry
6. If you work with lines, you’ll have options for Length, Azimuth, and Bearing
7. If you work with areas, you’ll have options for Area, Perimeter, and Area/Perimeter ^2

All in all, this is much easier than having to write a functional attribute.