Quick Tip 32 – Multi-Delete Fields (XTools)

ArcGIS 10.2.2 and XTools 11.1

Ever had the frustrating experience of trying to tell ArcGIS to delete a field from your attribute table and it straight up refuses, with nary an error message or explanation in sight? Well, XTools has a handy function that almost never fails to delete fields, and which also lets you delete multiple fields at once – which is particularly handy when you have lots of random fields left over from a join that you no longer want. You will need to have XTools installed: if you don’t have it installed, you can see how to do that in this Overview I published.

Above I have a shapefile with the counties of the United States of America. I’ve highlighted some fields that I don’t particularly need, an there are far more that aren’t in view in this screenshot.

To bring up the MultiDelete Fields dialogue box, right-click on any field name, then click on the MultiDelete Fields option.

Here, you simply need to check the boxes for any field you want deleted. If it’s just one or two fields you want to save, it can be quicker to click the “Select all” button, then to uncheck the handful of fields you want to keep. That’s what I did in the screenshot above. Then, you click the “Ok” button.

Here you can see it deleted all the fields except for the three fields I left unchecked and the Shape* field, which is an intrinsic field that all shapefiles have, and which cannot be deleted.