A tool was created which displays the hex dump versions of .shp and .shx files submitted by a keyboard user. Then the tool interprets those hex dumps according to their ESRI specified formats. This is primarily an educational tool, but can be used as well by GIS professionals, for example to examine shapefiles that are not performing correctly, and might have small but fatal corruptions. A tool was created to merge two polyline shapefiles, or two polygon shapefiles, under suitable assumptions, e.g. similar dbf files. The two shapefiles must be of the same shape type, i.e. both point files, and both polyline files, or both polygon files. In addition it is best if they have 'compatible' data, i.e the same field names and the same field types in their .dbf files. A useful example is when the shapefiles have been created with drawing tools. In the event that considerable time was spent drawing the shapes very carefully, merging will save considerable time and effort over re-drawing. And the dbf files will usually be compatible. A tool was created, when using Map Objects, when one is creating a layer from a csv file, to finish the job and make a shapefile from the created layer. A tool was created, similar to the third tool here, so that the user has an option to choose attributes to be stored as a numeric value, rather than as a string, by specifying the size and a precision for the numeric field.
