Listing the coordinates of Polygons in ArcGIS

So far all of my Blog posts have been about AutoCAD and AutoChart (primarily because these are what I spend the majority of my time dealing with) but Wish Software are also involved in producing and working with GIS deliverables, so today I'm going to add a tip about working in ArcGIS.

If you have a Polygon feature set, it may not be immediately obvious as to how to produce a listing of the centre coordinates of those polygons. Whilst the polygons are displayed in their 'Real-World' position, accessing their actual coordinate values involves a couple of steps.

1. Firstly, you have to add two fields to hold the X and Y coordinate values, so open the Attribute table in ArcGIS and use Options to Add a Field 'Easting' and a Field 'Northing', both of type Double.
2. Right click on the Easting Field and use the Calculate Geometry option to add the X-coordinate of each polygon centroid. Repeat Calculate Geometry with the Northing Field to add the Y-coordinate of the centroid and you'll then have the E/N coordinates for the centre of each polygon stored within the Attribute table.
3. If you want to produce this information as a listing, you can then just use the Export option from the Attribute Table to output to a Text File.

All of the steps above are illustrated in the following video: