Translations:Arch SHP/3/en

Shapefiles are composed of 3 files (a .shp, a .shx and a .dbf file), any of them can be used with this importer. They are composed of 2D objects of one geometry type, that can be polygons/faces, polylines or point cloud (all 3 types are supported by this importer), and custom fields, for which each face, polyline or point in the shapefile has a value. This is the real gem of GIS, to bind a database with geometry. The most common use is to have one field to represent the elevation coordinate of each shape in the file. On opening the file, the importer will ask you what field to get shape elevations from.