Importing Arcview Shapefiles Into MARPLOT®

U.S. Department of Commerce

For folks interested in bringing information from another GIS product into LandView^®, we provide a utility shp2mie.exe that translates an Arcview Shapefile into a MARPLOT Import Export (MIE) file.

Shapefiles are a GIS data set used in ESRI's ArcView^® software program to represent a set of geographic features such as streets, places, metropolitan areas, and tract boundaries. Shapefiles can represent point, line, or area features. Each record in a shapefile represents a single geographic feature and its attributes. Shapefiles are a standard file format for transferring such information between GIS mapping software programs.

The MARPLOT Import/Export (MIE) format is the standard format for exchanging MARPLOT information. These files contain complete MARPLOT information about each map object. When you import a file, the objects specified in the file are added to your map(s). If the objects in the file are from maps that are not currently available on your MARPLOT system, new maps will be created to accommodate the objects. Similarly, if the objects are from layers that are not in the current system, new layers will be created. Any maps created during import are put in the same folder (directory) as the MARPLOT application itself. For more details about this process, see the MARPLOT User's Guide.

To start the program, simply double click on shp2mie.exe which is located in the LV4 folder on your hard drive. The SHP2MIE program can read shapefiles that are unprojected ("Geographic" projection, in ArcView terms), or that are projected in either UTM or Albers. If your shapefiles are unprojected, you will then get a Windows dialog box requesting that you point to the folder and identify the Shapefile you wish to translate. After selecting the file, click the open button. The Shape File to MARPLOT MIE file conversion dialog box (shown below) then opens.

You first need to choose a field from the shapefile attributes table to serve as a name for each map object. To avoid confusion, you should try to select a field that provides a unique name for each map object.

The default MARPLOT map name is User's map. This map is automatically created when you install MARPLOT. There' s no need to change this default setting.

If you wish to translate only selected map objects, you should select the field using the scroll bar in the FILTERING field and the value that will serve as a filter.