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Fellow GIS-ers, As you may be aware, Microsoft dropped dbf support from the newest versions of Access (2013 & 2016). Their reasoning?...dbf is an antiquated and/or dead file format. They either did not realize or ignored that dbf is the tabular format behind all shapefiles and very much still in use throughout the entire GIS industry. It is the universal format for, at the very least, GIS data exchange. Unfortunately, this means one can no longer link to a shapefile dbf table from within an Access database to work directly with the data (neither manually nor through VBA). I’ve been on the phone and exchanged numerous emails with Microsoft’s support personnel over the past couple of weeks, building a case for bringing back dbf support. The best I can get (without a “Premier” support ticket) is the suggestion to continue using Access 2010, or some other registry hack-type workarounds…all of which are unviable in the long-term. So, I’m pushing for a “grass-roots” campaign, if this problem directly affects you…please consider voting for the current “bring back dbf” suggestion in the online Access suggestion box: https://access.uservoice.com/forums/319956-access-desktop/suggestions/11075742-bring-back-the-support-for-connecting-to-dbase Click the “Vote” button Enter your email address Enter your name (the “Name” box will appear after entering your email address) Click “3 Votes” (Or 1 Or 2) Thanks (and feel free to pass the voting instructions along to others outside this forum!)

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.