Shapefiles Need to Die 

If ESRI really want the shapefile to die, They really need to make their file geodatabase open-source/nonproprietary.

Team Layer Package since 9.3.1 here. Shapefiles are terrible. Always love it when somebody says they sent you a shape file and all they sent you was the DOT shp.

Once newer versions of Excel quit saving to .dbf format, shapefiles were pretty much dead to me. I used to edit the .dbf file in excel to make changes that were a pain to do in ArcMap. It was a good thing overall since it forced me to get things done outside my comfort zone.

Topology, sub types and domains can be done in shapefiles just not in ArcGIS, same with network analysis and most of the stuff you mentioned. Geodatabases still have a long way to go to be good enough to fully replace a shapefile imo, the commodity a shapefile presents is great for small projects, in geodatabases sometimes you have upwards of 20+ shapes in a single GDB, just going through it all and finding what you actually want is really difficult compared to having 5 or so folders with shpafiles (I know there are feature datasets but again, feels like overwork to me in a simple project to go through all that hustle), geodatabases allow for multiple characters for the field names but as such, it promotes not normalizing the data, where as in a shapefile you oughta make an efford to be efficient and concise with your field names. I think a good step in the right direction to terminate shapefiles would be to allow geoprocess to take over a file, so for example if I wanna make a join of shape A and shape B, both in a dataset, allow me to make it so that the join will fully replace the A shape in the geodatabase, or make it a temporary layer in the geodatabase. -----EXTRA NOTE----- I love your videos and I think you're a very knowledgeable person regarding the use of GIS, could you please make a video on what certifications you recommend getting to find a job in this field? And how to properly prepare for them (if possible, in a budget friendly manner) I'm currently thinking of getting the 19-001 Enterprise geodata management professional ESRI certification, but i'm not sure it's worth it nor do I know how I should prepare for it. If you happen to read all this bloat thank you dearly for all the help and tutorials, material like this is crutial to further develop the GIS community and make ourselves have an easier time dominating this art.

I remembered another thing I forgot to mention in the interview. If you try to add a feature by x y coordinates ( add data -> xy coordinates) , and you accidentally click an excel file instead of a csv file, ArcPro will crash, and the only way to restart it, is by closing it with task manager :/

In the Arcmap SDK curves were called CircularArcSegment, in the Pro SDK they are called EllipticalArcSegment so I'm guessing ellipticalsegments are now supported in a polyline and the line you exported does look elliptical. Perhaps the segmentation routine used to create shapefile approximated it with 2 arc segments?

Shapefile has become the cross-app, cross-platform geospatial exchange file of choice. Unless there is another format that provides the same capabilities it is unlikely the format will be killed.

What format other than a shapfile would you recommend when the end user can’t use a geodatabase?

Thank you for making this special request video!

You know I sent this to some friends today and we watched it and it really makes me wonder why we can't get more Crossover with Geo packages. I've used them a fair amount for my maps I make for Carrymap but ESRI seems to barely want to have anything to do with them. You can even store symbology and styles inside of them too. Have you ever messed around with Geo packages?

Thanks for the video, one other limitation that may have not been mentioned is the 2GB file size limit. In reality and in my experience, file size becomes more of a problem for shapefiles at a much smaller footprint.

I have my entire geodatabase on my flash drive. I would like to add it to another flash drive, in case something happens to my initial. Can this be done fairly simply? Copy and paste to the new drive?

Thanks again for the info. Some email services do not like .zip files. They get rejected. This makes it even more difficult to share shapefiles.

I understand many of the drawbacks of shapefiles, but I can't figure out how to send gis data outside of sending a shapefile. Can you make a video of that workflow?

Brother could do 3d map in ArcGIS pro 3.2

This cracked me up, and yes I agree that shapefiles need to retire.

Misalignment between the lines is due to inconsistent projections.

.cpg is an encoding file that allows for displaying characters in different languages lets kill the shapefile, fgdb or geopackage ftw

The 90's called and they want their GIS file format back. So many other (better) ways to share data today...file geodatabases, KML, JSON, AGO, Excel....C😬verages

I COULD NOT AGREE MORE

You said 3 files required as a minimum to share. I believe the 3 file you mention (check the video from minute 2.30 to 3.10) Its 4 files is minimum, and you forgot the file. .prj store projection information

Shapefiles. Ruining your meticulously named attribute data since 1998.

100% disagree with shapefiles needing to die/go away. I have to wonder how much was paid for that title or thought. What other applications can open geodatabases? As compared to .SHP