Target layer: Polygon

Description: Drag a selection box. All polygons intersected by the box will be analyzed for overlaps and if present the overlaps will be drawn with the user set symbol. The symbol can be set in the ET GeoTools control panel - Draw Tab. 

Advantages: 

• Analyzes the topological relations between polygons - no matter what the data source is (shapefile or Geodatabase)
• The license of ArcGIS does not matter (ArcView is good enough)
• Allows finding topological problems which can be fixed with one of the other tools of ET GeoTools

Notes:

• ArcGIS 8.3 users can use the ET GeoTools Control Panel - Polygon Edit Settings tab to specify whether Map Topology to be used with the tool. Using Map Topology improves the performance of the function.
• Since ArcGIS (all current versions) has problems with overlay operations performed on polygons defined with true arcs, internal ArcGIS errors might occur if there are true arcs polygons in the dataset.
• To improve the performance of the tool, apply it on small portions of your data (about 500 polygons) at a time.

Example:  

Before

After