I'm a new user of ArcGIS (just started this week), I have two shape files, one is a set of polygons making up a geologic map of an area. The other is a set of latitude and longitude points with associated geochemistry. I want to combine both files so that I will have a set of points that will also tell me what polygon they lie within in the attributes table. I then want to be able to export the attributes out to excel. So far I've tried combining the files with both merge and union, but because one is a point, and the other is a polygon I haven't had success.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Please feel free to ask for any additional details, like I said I'm extremely new at this.