Notes on Using NRCS SSURGO Soil Map Data in ArcView

Data is downloaded in a common compressed format that must be "unzipped" before use. A number of shareware products such as WinZip are available to uncompress these files.
Data is in WGS-84 Decimal Degrees.
Download the ArcInfo Coverage (Cov.zip). ArcView can read these files and you can optionally use the Save as a Shape file option to save the data as a shape file.
Tabular data (contained in tab.zip) files have no extension. After uncompressing, rename these files with the extension .txt so ArcView will recognize them as table data.
Feature (spatial) data and tabular data are in separate files and must be joined.
The ArcView "Geoprocessing" extension is very useful in clipping large soil maps into smaller areas (save as a shape file first).
The SSURGO Data Users Guide describes the tabular data and how it relates.

Quick Guide to

File/Coverage	Description
Caxxx_a	Mapunit coverage of area xxx. in decimal degrees. Musyn is the data field that contains the soil type code.
Mapunit	This table can be joined to the feature theme by Musyn and contains a text description of the soil type.