Hawth's Analysis Tools for ArcGIS

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 Summary

ADD XY LINE DATA TOOL
Input: a table containing pairs of coordinates
Output: a new line shapefile, consisting of lines created by connecting the pairs of XY coordinates in the input table
Features:

• allows the user to optionally specify a unique ID field in the input table, which will be written to the output table thereby allowing the user to join the input table to the new line shapefile
• works with comma delimited textfiles, DBase files, and database tables (e.g. Access tables)

Limitations:

• does not provide a method for the user to define the coodinate system of the new shapefile (the user must do that themselves using ArcToolBox)

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 Help

Getting started. A table containing pairs of XY coordinates must be loaded into ArcMap in order to use this tool. Select the table you wish to process from the drop-down box. The tool will list the numeric fields in the table in the five dropdown boxes from which the user must identify the FROM X, FROM Y, TO X, and TO Y fields, and optionally the unique ID field. The tool will create one feature per record in the input table by creating a line based on the from and to points (note that the line therefore has consistent directionality).

The input table. An example of a simple input table would be a text file containing four columns (the first row should always be the field names):
FROMX, FROMY, TOX, TOY
521439.5,4995001.3,521689.3,4995385.2
... etc.