Using Select by Attributes
Release 9.1 Last modified December 7, 2006

About selecting features by searching with an SQL expression

Structured Query Language (SQL) is a powerful language you use to define one or more criteria that can consist of attributes, operators, and calculations. For example, imagine you have a map of customers and want to find those who spent more than $50,000 with you last year and whose business type is “Restaurant”. You would select the customers with this expression: Sales > 50000 AND Business_type = ‘Restaurant’.

When you search with SQL expressions, you can select features or table records in any data format supported by ArcMap. However, you format expressions differently depending on the format of the data you are querying

The Select by Attributes dialog box allows you to select features on a given layer using a SQL expression.
Learn more about building SQL expressions for different formats

How to use Select by Attributes

1. Click Selection on the Main menu and click Select By Attributes.
2. Click the Layer dropdown arrow and click the layer containing the features you want to select.
3. Click the Method dropdown arrow and click a selection method.
4. Double-click a field to add the field name to the expression box.
5. Click an operator to add it to the expression.
6. Click Get Unique Values to see the values for the selected field.
Double-click a value to add it to the expression.

7. Click the Verify button to see if you are using proper syntax or if the criteria you've entered will select any features .
8. Click Apply.
The status bar at the bottom of the ArcMap window tells you how many features are selected.

9. Use the Clear button to empty the expression box.
10. Use the Save and Load buttons respectively to save your current query as a file or load an existing one.
The files used to save the queries have a .EXP extension but can be edited with any text editor. Only the content of the expression box is saved in the file, not the complete expression.

11. Click Close when you are finished selecting features.

Tip

For guidelines on how to build SQL expressions for different data formats, see About building an SQL expression.

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