| iTool User's Guide: Working with Maps |

## Creating a Shape Visualization

A shapefile stores nontopological geometry and attribute information for the spatial features in a data set. The shapefile format was created by ESRI, and is widely used in the geographic information systems community. The iTools display a shapefile's data by creating one of three special visualization types: ShapePolygon, ShapePolyline, and ShapePoint. The type of visualization created depends on the type of data in the shapefile.

Note For more information on the shape visualizations, see Visualization Type Properties.

You can create a shape visualization in one of the following ways:

- Using File Open and selecting the shapefile

- Using File Import to launch the Data Import Wizard, and selecting the shapefile

- Using Insert Visualization and either selecting the appropriate shape visualization type (if you have already imported the shape data into an iTool) or selecting the shapefile whose data you want to import for a shape visualization

Note When creating a shape visualization using File Import or Insert Visualization, if the shapefile contains more than one item (polygon, polyline, or point), you can choose to create a single visualization containing all of the included items, or to create an individual visualization for each item in the file.

IDL Online Help (March 01, 2006)