ArcGIS Shapefiles

A shapefile is the geographic information systems (GIS) digital map layer format that is designed to work with ArcGIS software. A shapefile is a combination of three or more files. For example, a shapefile called chempt.shp is actually a combination of the following three files, all of which must be available for the shapefile to work properly:

• chempt.dbf
• chempt.shp
• chempt.shx

Download all related files for a shapefile, and save them in the same folder.

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