Natural Earth is a crisp basemap dataset available for the world at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. I downloaded one of their most detailed layers, the 1:10m Admin 1 – States, Provinces shapefile for use as my example.

If you were asked to write a metadata record or some other type of report about this dataset, you would want your description to be as complete as possible. You might find it necessary to generate a long list of place or topic keywords. Often, the attribute table already includes this information. You just need a good way to extract it.

For instance, if I symbolize by category on the ENGTYPE_1 field of my natural earth layer, I get a long list of administrative area types. There’s way more than just states and provinces here! If only I could select this list and paste it somewhere else to have in a usable format. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

The solution I have come up with is not perfect. I keep thinking there must be a better way. If any of my readers know of one, I would love the feedback. For now, this method certainly beats having to type the entire list:

First, open attribute table and right click on the field you want to turn in to a keyword list. Then, select Summarize…

Chose one summary statistic field. It doesn’t matter which, but works a little better if you chose something that’s always going to be the same. I chose “CheckMe” because that’s basically a flag (yes or no) field. It doesn’t matter which summary statistic (minimum, maximum, first, last etc.) you pick either. You won’t be using any of this information–it’s just a way to get ArcMap to make a list for you that includes each category one time.

Hit the browse button in the Specify output table section. Then, change Save as type to Text File.

Open up your text file in Notepad and remove the first line (the field names). Then, do Edit — > Replace and replace all commas, quotation marks, numerals 1-9 and whatever text phrase was in your summary statistic field with nothing.

When you are done, you end up with this. If you want to add commas and move these all into one row, it’s pretty easy from here.