A Windows CE operating system is used in a field-based data collection system, designed for a variety of precision agricultural applications. It has been developed to internally use the Esri shape (SHP) and dBASE (DBF) file formats for all data recording. These file formats were chosen to maximize the usefulness of the data collected since the data files can be opened directly from a number of leading precision agricultural GIS office software packages without further conversion, including ArcExplorer and ArcView GIS.