ESRI shapefiles are a very common mapping or GIS dat exchange format. Google Earth uses an exchange format called KML, which is a variant of XML. GSpatial Toolbar is a program that can convert ESRI shapefiles to KML and automatically cause these to be loaded into Google Earth.
Most ESRI shapefiles are accompanied by an attribute table, a DBase format database table, that contain data about the geographical features. For example, a shapefile of the world's countries might be accompanied by a DBase file containing their names and their populations.
gSpatial Toolbar is also capable of different rendering types, in addition to simply drawing the geographical features from your shapefiles in Google Earth, such as doing a thematic query (i.e. coloring in your geographical data according to values within the accompanying database).
You can not only use the data in the accompanying DBase tables, but also link your own database or spreadsheet data that for example reside in an Excel spreadsheet to the DBase data contained in the shapefile.
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