I don't mean to belabor the point but it's important because it can be quite confusing. So there's only one here I'll just say 'Add' and so what you'll notice is that it has added the data to ArcMap but we still can't map it. So ArcMap is smart enough to know that it wants you to select which of the worksheets that it's going to work with here. So within Excel if you're familiar with it, you can have multiple worksheets. This is actually the worksheet inside that file. However, if I select the Add Data button and browse to that file and say Add. That's okay, that's what I would expect to see because this is not a GIS file format. What they're basically telling us here is wait a minute, this is not a GIS file format, there's nothing here for me to map so I can't map it. So if I drag that onto the map, it says could not add this specified data object to the map. So let's do that, let's add it to our map. So here I have ArcMap open and in the Arc catalog pane, I have the same file here, the volcanic latitude longitude XLS. We have to tell it that those are coordinates. So, there are coordinates in columns in this table but as far as the GIS software is concerned, it doesn't know that those are our coordinates yet. I just want to make clear that this is an Excel format, this is not in a GIS format already. I thought that was kind of an interesting dataset. So here, we have a file that I've downloaded that includes the latitude and longitude for locations of volcanoes in Alaska. So I'm just going to walk you through how you get that data from in this case an Excel file, into the software so you can map those x and y coordinates for some points and then convert them into a GIS file that you can then work with.

They are very simple old file formats that anybody could pretty much work with. So these are very common file formats for exchanging data. They could be in an Excel file or a CSV file which is a comma separated value file. This is often the case especially when you're downloading point files or point coordinates. Sometimes when you download data it will be in a non GIS format.

Xy data file converter