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I want to use ArcMap 10.1 to calculate the straight (euclidean) distances from zip codes to their nearest city centers in about 300 U.S. metropolitan areas. I have two point shpfiles: one includes the centroids of all zip codes and the other includes the points that represent city centers. Both of the two shpfiles are in the GCS_North_American_1983, which prohibits me from doing the distance calculation.

I have converted the GCS into North America Lambert Conformal Conic to do the calculation.

It worked but what is the best way to do it?

PolyGeo
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user32375
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  • You will find useful advice at http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/5810, http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/4846, and http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/14750. The gist is that by using an appropriate (low-distortion) conformal projection you have made a good choice for the purpose of determining the nearest city centers correctly; there will be some errors in distance calculations; but those errors can be corrected if you wish. (The corrections for Stereographic and Mercator projections are particularly simple to compute.) – whuber Nov 21 '13 at 18:22

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