ArcGIS 10: Exporting part of an attribute table and renaming fields

Q: I want to create a dbf file containing a few columns from my layer's attribute table to send to a collaborator. I also want to rename some of the fields so she doesn't have to translate my shorthand. Please help!

A: Gladly!

First, you want to turn off the fields you are not interested in exporting: Open your attribute table, right click the field of (un)interest, and select "turn field off". This should remove it from view, but don't worry... you can undo this command by clicking the table options in the upper right corner of the attribute table (the icon looks like a bulleted paper)and selecting "Turn all fields on".

Back to the problem at hand... repeat turning off all of the fields you aren't interested in sharing. Now export the data as a dbf (check this post for info). Use Excel to open the dbf file.

Note that you can of course export your entire attribute table to Excel and remove unwanted fields by deleting the columns in Excel instead of hiding them in ArcGIS, but sometimes there are exportation restrictions on sensitive data, so I wanted to outline how to avoid importing prohibited data into a new program.

The file still has your original field names. We didn't change those in ArcGIS 10 because field aliases are lost when you export the data, so now we just change the column names in Excel.

And now for the silliest step... Excel 2007 won't save files as dbf,so we have to save the Excel file in the old .xls format (Save As Excel 97-2003 Workbook) and re-import it into ArcGIS (notes here) to then export it again as dBase (dbf). Horray for hoops!