Is there a way to interpret the data in the .dbf file so that I can figure out what record is connected to a particular body of water in a .shp file? The reason I ask is that I have three large man made lakes in my map that are all coded as swamps. Additionally, there is no name data for them. I would like to find the record for those bodies of water so I can change to type to lake and also give them a name. Is there some way to convert lat. and long. to some of the number data in the file? Thank you.
This kind of thing can easily be done with Globalmapper, although you wouldn't actually be editing the .dbf but exporting a new version of shapefile and .dbf. You can play with the free trial version, although it won't let you export anything. If you contact them however, I believe they will give you a free trial license key that works for a month: http://globalmapper.com/
Is the source data NHD?
You could us GM to look at the data and note the COMID; then find the record with that COMID in the .dbf file. Make the changes to that record in the .dbf file. Do NOT add nor remove any records from the .dbf file and it will stay in sync with the other shape files. No need to make a new shape file.
GM's the easiest way to do it, but how many "Swamps" do you have in your database? If not too many, and not too large, you could open the DBF in Excel and search for "swamp", then change it to "lake".
Thank you for all the good advice. Worked like a charm!
You can also load these files into postGIS and process it that wa.