NOAA/NCDC CLIMAPS #2 Climate Atlas of the US

I had previously written about a strange projection in the NOAA/CLIMAPS data, and am now following that up with a strange projection in the Climate Atlas of the US data.  This data comes to the end user with no spatial reference or documentation on disk which describes the spatial reference.  However, I found a helpful page on the climate atlas website which describes the reference: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/cdrom/climatls2/faq.html#SPHEROID.  This reference, however, is not a common one.  A similar projection is available in ArcGIS though, and by modifying the reference latitude (i.e., latitude of origin), we can apply the new custom projection to these files by "define projection".  Here is a link to the custom projection file.

ArcGIS Online CSV Hosting: It's Not All There

ArcGIS Online allows a user to upload CSVs, but as we found out, this feature provides less extensive sharing capabilities than other comparable cloud hosting services.

The documentation describes CSV hosting.  It is possible to upload the file for others in a group to download, but it seems that the ability to share the CSV, a link or as something that could be added to multiple maps, is only available when a premium subscription is activated.

In lieu of a premium subscription, an excellent option is to host the CSV with Google Docs and share the URL with relevant parties.  They can then add the CSV to their invididual ArcGIS Online maps, as this blog post shows.  The downside with this approach is that it does not integrate with your group as set up on ArcGIS Online.  You will also need to publicly share the CSV from Google Docs, since that is the only way you can expose a URL (without some kind of additional programming).  Thus, the downside to this approach is for mostly for organizations that have particular data sharing requirements.

Table to table bug (ArcGIS)?

Is there a bug with the "table to table" tool in ArcGIS when using it to export a DBF from an Excel file (XLS, XLSX)? I don't know. BUT, I would avoid using any Excel files in ArcGIS. This would be one of many poorly documented bugs ... support for Excel in ArcGIS is a weak link, and you really don't want to be basing multistep analysis off some poorly imported data (trust me!). So you have an XLSX file that is more than the limit of rows for XLS ... how do you get it to DBF (since Excel 2007 doesn't export DBF). If you have MS Access, I would recommend going that route. I tried this out with a file that I was getting super incorrect output on, and it worked. Seems like a nice, clean, consistent solution.