Hello everyone, welcome to another ArcMap Tutorial for Beginners. In the following article, I am going to show you how to export shapefile to KMZ in ArcMap. I am using ArcMap version 10.7.1. KML or KMZ is a common file format that can be opened in most GIS software such as Google Earth, ArcGIS Earth, Arc Globe as well as QGIS.
So first, open the shapefile to ArcMap. You can do this by dragging the shapefile from Arc Catalog to the ArcMap data frame. Or you can also use the Add Data button and search for your shapefile. In this example, I have a contour file which is a great example to do this.
After that, go to Arc Toolbox >> Conversion Tool >> to KML and then double click Layer to KML. The conversion window will open up as follow.
There are some options you can tweak. For example, you may check the “clamped features to ground” if you want to override the Z value in your features. Specify the output file location and then press OK to start the conversion process.
Wait until the conversion process is completed. Make sure there is no error and then finally, we can try opening the KMZ file in other software such as Google Earth.
Open Google Earth and then go to File >> Open. Locate the KMZ file we just created and now it should opened in Google Earth as follow.
Note:
Using this method, the the line style, color and thickness information will be preserved in the KMZ file. But you can freely change this in the Google Earth if you like.
I think that’s it for now. Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoy it and see you in the next tutorials. Cheers.