A Complete Beginner's Guide to ArcGIS Desktop (Part 1)

hello guys welcome to this beginner's guide to arcgis desktop tutorial through this tutorial i aim to give you guys a very in-depth understanding of the capabilities of arcgis desktop if you're getting started as a beginner now s3's arcgis has been around for quite a long time and even today despite the competition it gets from so many other commercial and also open source gis tools it remains as one of the most widely used gis softwares in so many different areas like the health sector transportation and navigation water resources engineering geological sciences you name it so yeah before we start looking into this program let's just see what sort of topics we are going to cover during this tutorial now again this is an introductory guide for beginners but what's interesting is that i'm going to take you through these functionalities which we're going to discuss through practical applications that means by the end of this course you will know exactly what can be done using the available tools and also how you can use those tools to actually get the work done that's relevant to you quickly and efficiently i have divided this tutorial into four parts to start off i'll give you a bit of an overview of what arcgis desktop is and we'll discuss the different components of the interface then we will move on to discuss how we can use this software to work with vector data now on the screen you can see the type of subtopics we are going to discuss things like types of vector data how to do basic styling and geoprocessing tasks and how to edit the attributes and how to use the field calculator and the geometry calculator and how to digitize things and how to create new shape files and how you can export those new vector files into different file formats now in the third part i will be going over how we can use this software to work with raster data now we will be covering things like introduction to raster data styling and visualizing how we can use geoprocessing tools to work with raster data for the purposes such as clipping and how we can actually do a 3d visualization of a raster discuss things like what is raster reclassification and how to get certain spatial statistics from raster data also i'll be showing you how we can convert between rasters and vectors and what could be those potential benefits of having being able to convert between raster data and vector data and in the fourth part i'm going to explain to you guys how you can create a standard map using the data which we worked with to create a very meaningful map which you can let's say present to your clients or even just do it for yourself for your own satisfaction now as you saw we are going to cover quite a bit of things here in this tutorial and i will guarantee that this will be sufficient for you to have a general understanding of the capabilities of this software and then of course with that head start you'll be able to easily discover a lot more on your own quite comfortably all right guys so without further ado let's go ahead and get started with the tutorial arcgis desktop is comprised of four main parts we have arcmap our catalog art scene and our globe we can see that arcmap is the primary application where we usually put most of our attention because that's the program which actually lets you work with our js data sets to do things like use geoprocessing tools compile and edit the gis data sets automate certain workflows create and let's say print maps organize and manage your jio databases things like that so it goes without saying that this is the piece of software which we'll be spending most of our time with during this tutorial now our catalog is a dedicated tool which we can use to organize and manage our gis data now if you're a windows user you can say that it's something like the windows explorer but in this case it's a part of the arcgis desktop application now arcgis catalog can help you to properly organize your gis files and manage your jio databases search for certain contents manage your gis servers things like that so coming on to auxin auxin is another component of arcgis desktop which is primarily used for visualizing geospatial data in 3d now in here you can do things like create 3d feature data use 3d analysis geoprocessing tools to edit or modify your 3d data and visualize your 3d data and do things like draping images or vector data over surfaces create 3d animations using your 3d data so that you can provide a much more interesting three-dimensional presentation of your gis data to your clients things like that so finally we come to the arc globe application now our globe is another application under arcgis desktop which allows you to weave your gis data on a globe surface it's quite useful in the sense that you can use your jis data both in 2d and 3d and sort of weave them with a global perspective all right now let's go back to arcmap and we'll have a look at the user interface of arcmap now over here you can see that i have opened up arcmap and the two different lines that you see over here on the top are actually the toolbars different toolbars now we have the flexibility to actually move the toolbars around if you move your mouse point on top of this thing that you can see actually something like a dotted line you will see that your cursor changes and you can just simply click on that particular toolbar and you can actually drag it around and over here you can see actually the name of this toolbar is the standard toolbar and we have another toolbar which is the tools toolbar and of course if you want to put them back in you can simply move the toolbar to that designated place and it'll sort of fit in automatically just like this now in the standard and the tools toolbar you can see that we we have a few buttons now we'll actually talk about these buttons as well uh before we do that i would also like to talk about this table of contents that you see over here now this is actually something that we will always be using when we are using arcmap and this can be weaved as something like a panel now specifically about the table of contents we will be using this primary to visualize our layers now in gis programs like arcgis in which we get this arcmap application we're basically working in an environment where different geospatial information will be structured as different layers and all of those different layers will be actually sort of get placed in this table of contents and you can move that around just like this as you can see over here but usually i prefer to keep this on the left side so what i would normally do is i bring my mouse point over here and it'll sort of automatically snap in to the correct place just like this and even if you go to windows you can see that you have the same thing over here in case if you do not have this table of contents whenever you happen to open arcmap you can simply go to windows and you can actually enable the table of contents and it will open up as a different panel over here and over here you actually see two more panels which are the catalog and the search now one interesting thing is that even though we have the capability of opening our catalog as a separate application we don't really have to do that especially when we are working with arcmap and when we quickly need to access our geospatial data it's very very convenient to actually have this option over here which will open up our catalog itself as a separate panel as you can see over here which you can just move around according to your convenience just like this i'm going to snap it to the right side we can use this arc catalog to actually connect to our data now for example if i wanted to connect to a separate folder let's say i keep my information in a specific folder in d drive so by default we won't be able to weave that particular folder you can see even if i click on this drop down menu we do not really have that so what we need to do is we actually have to first create a connection that's how arcmap operates whenever we need to access a separate folder we need to create a connection first so the way to create a connection is actually by using this connect to folder button and once you have that you can see that i can actually very quickly navigate to the folder which i'm interested in it's in this geodeterlabs folder and it's actually the folder which corresponds to this particular tutorial which is number nine as you can see over here so all you have to do in order to connect to a certain folder is simply select that folder over here and click ok you can see that the folder which you connected to will get sort of will appear right over here and you just have to do this once and after you have done it once you can simply expand the contents of that folder simply by clicking on this plus sign and right now you can see that i have two folders this raster and shape files and if i expand this you can see that we have certain number of files actually inside this so we are able to directly access these files without actually having to navigate to these individual files using the windows explorer thanks to this inbuilt arc catalog of arcmap we'll be using this quite frequently so i'm not going to discuss much at this particular moment because we will definitely be using this inbuilt arc catalog during the future steps of this tutorial and in addition to this i also would like to draw your attention to this search panel that we have over here in fact if you do not want to access this through windows you can simply click on this button of the standard toolbar and i think you'll be able to recognize that this is the catalog button which will open up this inbuilt arc catalog and similarly you can see that we have a search panel as well now personally i very frequently use this use this search panel because i've been working with arcgis for quite some time so i know exactly what i'm looking for and that's precisely how this search panel can be of use to you guys now if you're a beginner then i suspect that you might not get much of a use from this search panel because you might not know exactly what to search isn't it when you gain a bit of experience and you get seasoned with different tools by using them quite frequently for example if i want to do an intersect operation i know that there is a tool called intersect now i can either go to this arc toolbox and try to find where that intersect tool is or what i would normally do nowadays is simply come over here and i just type intersect and just hit enter and it'll sort of list down all the things which happens to sort of contain that word intersect and from when i see this i know exactly what to look for so that's one of the benefits of actually having this search panel especially when you're familiar with the different tools but let's say as a beginner what i would recommend to you guys at least for some time is to actually just explore this arc toolbox which you can see over here which contains all the tools that are sort of embedded in this arcmap program and it contains hundreds of tools which will be actually quite useful for so many different geoprocessing tasks that we are going to perform but of course we are not going to make use of all the tools over here we will be using only a handful of the tools but of course you can see that the tools actually pertain to different types of special operations and again if you're a beginner it can be a bit overwhelming when you see this toolbox like this now for example i'll just show you guys a quick trick i told you guys that i've been using this intersect tool directly from the search panel now if you click on this this green color line of text you will see that it actually opens up the toolbox inside our catalog so you know that this intersect tool is located in analysis tools overlay and intersect so if i go over here to analysis tools overlay and from here you can see that i can access this intersect tool so simply i can double click and the tool will open up just like this well don't worry we are not going to use this tool just yet because i'm still talking about the the interface in general and we haven't actually dived into any geoprocessing operations yet so that's a bit of a description about these different toolbars and panels that you can work with when you're working in arcmap all right now we'll go ahead and start working with some vector data now if you look over here you can see that there is one folder called shape files now s3 shape files are actually one type of vector data but there are so many other different vector data types but for this tutorial we will be mainly focusing on the type sri shape file which is actually one of the most commonly used type of js vector data now over here that i have different shape files called banks natural water region of interest 1 region of interest 2 river study area and you can see that the file itself is actually just a single file called.shp now this is actually the shape file which we are interested in but if i were to navigate to the same place through my windows explorer yes over here you can see that i have actually navigated to the same location which is inside this shapefiles folder but you can see that for banks over here even though we see just one file you can see over here actually that particular name has got one two three four five six seven different files and the same goes for natural water as well as you can see over here this estrus shape files are actually not just one file it's actually a combination a collection of different files which serves a specific purpose now for example if we talk about this bank's shape file you can see that we have one file called banks.prg well this is the file which actually contains all the information about the projection and this bank store dbf will actually contain all the information which corresponds to the attributes of that particular shape file so similarly all of these files together actually forms the s reshape file now that's something to keep in mind and if you want to open one of these shape files from this windows explorer it can be a bit confusing which file to sort of open isn't it and if you wanted to access this shapefile using some sort of a gis tool like arcgis and if you were to navigate to the place using our catalog it actually only shows you the file which is relevant to us which is this dot shp file so for an example if i wanted to open this region of interest shape file all i have to do is just drag it and drop it into your working interface and now you can see i have something called my region of interest one now you might be curious to know what is the region of interest too so all i'm going to do is just select this drag it and drop it over here by the way guys if you are following along and if you would like to do the same exact thing that i'm doing right now i'll be passing you all of these data as well you can download them quite easily from the from the link which i have given in the description so make sure that if you are actually just getting started with arcmap or if you if you just want to replicate the same exercise which i'm doing over here first make sure you download this set of data and after that you can actually follow along without any problem all right similarly i have another shape file called river over here now you can see that when i dragged and dropped this region of interest 1 and region of interest 2 both of these shape files are actually kind of polygons as you can see quite clearly and if you're using a mouse you can use your scroll wheel to actually zoom in and zoom out just like this but let's drag this reverse shape file and see how it looks yeah now you can see that this river is actually not a polygon but it's something like a poly line but it's a line now this type of geospatial data is actually belonging to the type polyline this region of interest since we're covering a big spatial area it's of type polygon and over here let's say we have another shape file called banks so what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag it and drop it over here and now you can see that it's actually a dif it's actually of a different type it's not a polygon or a polyline either now this shape file is actually of the type point all right now if you look closely at these different files you can see that the icon itself differs from one another now you can see that this natural water region of interest 1 region of interest 2 study area all of these actually having the same type of icon which says that it's actually of the type polygon but the river you can see that it's it looks sort of a line which indicates that it's actually of the type polyline but the banks you can see that it shows a couple of dots over here which gives the idea even before you open the shapefile that it's actually of type point so that's actually something quite uh useful especially when you're navigating using this arc catalog [Music] all right now let's say that if you wanted to access the specific information about this about each of these different attribute all of those information can be quite easily accessed using something called an attributes table if you happen to have multiple attributes those information will be listed down in this so called attributes table now for example now when you have the dots over here just because the name of the shape file was banks you sort of might have an idea that it might be the locations of these different banks but right now we have zero information about each of these individual specific dot for example you don't know what each of these dots actually refer to which bank or which location and just like that we have zero information right now so if the provider of the shape file has already embedded those information into this shape file you can simply access all those information simply by going over here to the layers panel and click on the corresponding layer which you would like to access right click over here and go to this attributes table and keep in mind that all of these vector files all of these h3 shape files will contain this attributes table having the data inside the attributes table or not is actually another thing but every js vector file should have an attributes table just like this which you can simply open up and you can have a look at that from here especially when you're working with gis data from different sources these attributes table could be a bit messy because when we get data from different sources it's not always like properly organized unless if you were to do it by yourself and as js analysts it's one of the most common tasks before using the gis data for some useful purpose we first have to clean it up in a way that the data can be actually used for some meaningful purpose now over here these these different rows that you see over here corresponds to different attributes in this case in this case these different rows actually correspond to different points now you can see that when i highlight each of these rows if you look if you look over here you can see that the corresponding point gets highlighted as well so that's one way to select attributes and let's say if you wanted to select multiple attributes you can click your mouse button and drag it just like this so that you can see that multiple attributes or multiple points in this case gets highlighted and if you want to deselect all your selections you can click on this button which is this clear selection button and let's have a look at the columns we have something interesting over here you can see that the shape the type of the shape is actually point now that's because this is of the type point as i explained to you guys before and when you create the shape file this column will be there no matter what this particular column will be there because it because it indicates the type of your shape file and over here you can see very clearly each of these attributes are actually of the type point and these other columns can actually vary depending on the source where you got your data from now this shapefile actually i downloaded from openstreetmap so this is how it looks and over here you can see that we have things like the name of the bank over here and we have the operator and we have in some information about whether that bank has an atm or not most of the banks say yes and there are a couple of banks which also say no over here and over here there is one column called brand brand wiki brand wi-1 i'm not sure what that refers to just like that we actually have quite a bit of information we have something like a street address but it's not present for all the banks and we have just one single phone number over here and again as i told you the completeness of this information actually will depend on the on the source of the data which you acquired this data from and now if i close this and open up this river shape file the attributes table of of this river shape file you can see that very clearly it mentions the type of the type of the shape file which is of polyline and similarly we get to see all those different types of columns and what i'll be mostly interested in is actually this one the name of this river but you can see over here that we just have two rivers but we happen to have quite a number of attributes now i'm also curious as to why we have so many different attributes you can see that the river name is actually just it's either river tough or river eli but we get to see different pieces of attributes just like this now if you would like to actually do a bit of a sorting because as you can see over here the attributes have been mixed up between river tuff and river eli i'm going to just double click over here and that will sort of do a quick sort and you can see that first all the attributes which corresponds to river eli appeared what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually select only this first attribute and see whether something got highlighted or not you can see that this middle part of the river got highlighted and when i click on this one you can see that this part of the river got highlighted similarly just like that and similarly when i click on this river tuff you can see that this part got highlighted and this part got highlighted when i click on this one so what if i select the entire set of attributes yeah you can see that the entire polyline got highlighted and when you look at this you should get the idea that this is not just one single polyline but it's actually a continuous set of different polyline pieces that's why we have different pieces of attributes just like this so but somehow when we visualize it just like this everything appears like one single polyline but you can see that that one single river is made up of different polylines now there are ways to merge all of these together based on this river name because we have a common river name and we might be also doing that in a couple of steps later but just for the time being i just wanted to make sure i just wanted to explain to you guys even though we have two different attributes over here by the looks of it it's actually not the case when you open up the attributes table these two different rivers have been made up of different river segments which we can visually see from this attributes table just like this all right something to keep in mind and it's always a good practice if you happen to select something just like this before you exit the attributes table to deselect everything unless your intention was for some reason to select that particular attribute now if i come to this region of interest open the attributes table you can see that it actually doesn't contain anything much we have the mandatory column over here which explains the type of the shapefile which is a polygon and we have something called just id which actually doesn't say much about the region of interest and if i go to this region of interest 2 it's similar to the region of interest 2 and this region of interest 1 the attributes are actually quite similar in terms of the structure to region of interest to just that when i select this one you can see that this region of interest one gets selected all right i'm going to close this one out all right now i'm going to talk about different methods of styling vector data and adding labels which can be extremely useful when you are working with vector data all right now you can remember in the attributes table of this bank's shape file we got to see some names of different banks but let's say if i wanted to quickly get an idea about this particular point as you see over here and let's say i wanted to know what this bank could be without opening the attributes table now when using arcmap one of the most commonly used tools to access information from the attributes table very quickly but without opening the attributes table is simply by using this identify tool all you have to do is click on the item or click on the attribute for which you would like to obtain the information so for example if i want to know information about this particular point you can see that the same things that we saw inside the attributes table now gets displayed but only for this particular point because you clicked on that and from here we can very easily see that this is lloyd's bank and if i wanted to let's select this particular point you can see that that particular bank is hsbc now if you happen to click somewhere else you can see that it selects something else isn't it in this case i thought that i was clicking on this point but i happen to click just a bit outside the point which made me select this different which made me select this particular polygon over here and you can narrow that down simply by selecting which layer you would like to select when you actually click on that particular item now if i select that i want to select only the banks layer and then if i click over here and you see that nothing happens because there aren't any banks over here but only if i happen to select the bank yeah now you can see that it's working this is hsbc bank over here and similarly over here it's nat west and this bank is yeah it's another night fest over here and similarly if i wanted to select let's say this polyline i'm going to select river first and then i can select on that particular segment as you can recall it's actually not just a single continuous polyline that's why the thing that flashes right over here is actually just the piece of this segment and the name of that river is river taff as you can see from here if i select this you can see that the name of the river along with other information is just river li so instead of clicking on each of these items one by one what if i what if i could actually pull up some labels based on the information given on this attributes table if i were to open these banks over here again the attributes table of the banks you can see that each of these attributes contain its name now what if i can tap into this particular column and display it on arcmap itself that would be quite helpful isn't it so what i'm going to do is just keep in mind that the name of these banks are stored under this name column so i'm going to deselect everything and what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click over here and go to properties and under these properties you have one tab called labels so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on these labels and select put the tick mark for this label features in this layer and after that over here i'm going to select label the different features based on the name column as you can recall because the name column is the one which contains the names of the different banks and if i click on apply you can see that now it communicates with the attributes table and it sort of pulls out the name of the bank just like this and if you click ok now you can very easily zoom in and see which bank each of this point refer to quite interesting isn't it you can do the same thing with polylines and polygons as well and if you want to do some changes to the font size and the font style you can simply do that by going to properties again and from here you can see that you have most of the common editing tools which you can see in a standard word processing software like making the text bold or you can select a different text from here i'm going to stick with ariel and maybe i will increase the font size just a little bit i can even italic the font if i want and after doing all of that just click ok apply and you can click ok and now you can see that the name is quite apparent over here you can see over here it's the lloyd back it's the lloyd's bank hsbc netfest barclays over here along with this if you would like to make some changes to the to these different attributes you can do that as well let's say for these points if you would like to increase the size of the points or if you would like to maybe put a different icon for these points you can simply do that by clicking on this particular icon that you see over here now in this case the existing icon for banks is just a dot like this now if i were to click on this dot you can see that it opens up a symbol selector from here you can increase the size of the dot just like this if you wish to or if you would like to select a different icon from here let's say i wanted to select uh this circle 7 icon and maybe change the color to be red decrease the size just a bit and if i click ok you can see that now the banks got appeared with a different icon just like this now for the timing i'll just go ahead and turn off the labels because it looks a bit messy with all the labels so to turn off the labels you can simply just untick this one and if you click apply you can see that the labels actually got disappeared since we're talking about the styling of vector data of course just like points you can style your other types of vector data as well for example if you wanted to change the style of your reverse what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on this icon over here which will open up the symbol selector and from here first the first thing that i'm going to do is maybe change the the line color to be a bit of a darker blue and i'm going to increase the width maybe to about 1.7 and after that i can click ok yeah now you can see that the river line did thicken a bit just like this and now if i want to make a change to my region of interest to polygon you can see that i can have a fill color maybe a different fill color like like this for the region of interest too and maybe green color for region of interest one just like this you can do some basic vector styling simply by clicking on this particular icon that you can see right below the name of the layer now especially when you're talking about polygons you might encounter certain cases where you don't really need to fill up the entire polygon with colors but you would only like to have the outline of the polygon now for example over here we have no idea actually how much is the extent of this region of interest one because this particular thing as a layer is actually below this region of interest to you can see that the order of the layers over here if i were to select this region of interest means left click and if i drag it on top of this region of interest 2 you can see that this layer extends all the way up until here which i couldn't see before because of this order of these layers what i'm going to do is i'm going to put this layer back below this region of interest 2 which means this region of interest 2 will come on top of this region of interest 1 and one smart way to actually know the the extent of the region region of interest one is actually by getting rid of the the fill color of this region of interest too and by only retaining the outline which you can simply do by again going to the symbol selector and from here the fill color i'm going to select no color but the outline i'm going to maybe select black and i'm going to thicken the line a bit up until maybe 2 units and if i click ok you can see that the fill color got removed but instead we just have this outline and from here we can basically get an idea about the extent of this region of interest 1 and you can simply do that for region of interest 1 as well if you wish to you can select no color and the outline let's say in this case i'm going to specify the outline in this sort of an orange color increase thickness a bit yeah from here you can see the different spatial extents of the region of interest 1 and region of interest 2. so i hope you guys got some sort of a basic idea about styling different vector data which you can simply do by selecting clicking on this particular icon which is right below that individual layer and you can do the stylings according to your preference again for example if you wanted to style the river in a different way you can see that there are some recommendations from estuary itself depending on the type of the attribute for example for highways you can actually use this and for expressways you can use these inbuilt type of stylings but it's completely up to you to actually use those for example i'm going to use this to represent my river in that case if you were to use one of these in inbuilt styles i don't really need to go over here and worry about changing the corresponding color or changing the width i can simply click ok after selecting this particular icon and you can see that my reverse got changed accordingly but of course depending on your situation you might need to change the colors and you might need to make the appropriate changes to the thickness of your line depending on your specific case all right that's a bit about styling your vector data and how to add labels to your different attributes now i'm going to go ahead and teach you some basic geoprocessing tasks all right so for this exercise i'm going to actually talk about five different geoprocessing tasks which i personally happen to use very frequently so i thought that it would be good to teach you guys these but of course we are not going to get ourselves limited to only these five geoprocessing tasks as you learn more and more things you will discover that depending on your specific case you might be required to use the corresponding geoprocessing tool for your own specific case but but i'm going to get started with teaching you how to clip vector data now if you would like to temporarily turn on or off these layers you can simply do that by unchecking this box over here corresponding to each layer you can see that if i only wanted to have the region of interest 1 and let's say banks i can activate and deactivate the other layers accordingly and let's see if i only wanted to have the region of interest 2 and the reverse what i would do is i would just go ahead and uncheck these banks and read this region of interest 1. of course there is no harm in having those in your working interface but if you feel that it's actually kind of hindering your work with so many layers displaying different information it's always good to actually just turn them off and focus on the layers that you're actually working with at that particular moment so to teach you guys how to use the clip geoprocessing tool what i'm going to do is i'm going to open up region of interest 1 and the reverse shape file i'm going to cut this reverse shape file using this region of interest one shapefile so that i will get the corresponding stretches of these two rivers which falls only inside my region of interest one now visually you can see that that would be something starting from here all the way up to here for this river eli and from here all the way up to here for this river tuff and let's see for some reason i don't really need these uh these stretches of the river which falls outside of my region of interest one and for those kind of applications we can simply use the clip tool now again you can use this arc toolbox to navigate to the place where you can get this clip tool or the method that i prefer to use is just this search panel and i'm going to type clip and the tool which i'm interested in is this clip analysis tool and you can see that if you were to click on this green color text it opens up the exact location where the clip tool is located inside this arc toolbox it's on analysis tools and extract and click so you can either double click over here or you can directly click on this clip analysis tool which will open up this particular window so i'm going to get rid of this search panel for the time being and i'm going to input the features so my input features are going to be the river polyline either i can expand this and select river from here or if you have that in the layers panel it's also actually quite convenient to just drag it and drop it over here now that's actually the way that how i prefer to do it and i'm going to clip the features using the boundary of the region of interest one if you can see over here and if i were to expand this over here you can see that we still get the region of interest one over here which you can directly select if not you can simply drag it and drop it over here and we can select the output feature class from here if you open up this you can see that we don't get to see all the falls that we would normally see if you were to use windows explorer because as you can remember before we made the connection to this specific folder that's why we get to see only this specific folder which actually makes the things quite clean as well because once you make the connection it'll always be here so that you don't have to start navigating from the cod drive itself and go all the way up until the corresponding folder so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on this particular location i'm going to open up the shape files because we are still dealing with different shape files and i'm going to name this as clip underscore river maybe reverse and click on save and you can see that automatically the file type changes to be dot shp all right now we can simply click ok and over here at the bottom if you see a spinning globe or just a frozen globe just like this you can get the idea that arcmap is actually doing some sort of a geoprocessing task and afterwards you will see that it automatically adds that new vector layer in this case it's clip underscore reverse now it might not be that apparent because the color of this particular layer is actually something like a light green so of course i can go ahead and click on that particular icon and maybe change that to dark blue and maybe i can increase the width to be about three and now you can see that we get the stretches of the river which corresponds to only the boundaries of this region of interest one now if i were to just turn off this main reverse layer you can see that now we have the reverse until the extent of the boundary of this region of interest one which can be actually quite helpful in certain different tasks and again if i go to this attributes table of this clip reverse you can see that the attributes table appears like this i'm going to double click on this name column heading just like this and you can see that river eli if i were to highlight it like this these are the different polyline segments which sort of forms this river eli according to this if i were to select everything which corresponds to river eli you can see that the entire poly line gets selected well all the pieces of the polyline get selected and similarly the case is the same for river tuff as well as you can see over here i'm going to deselect everything now let's say that if you wanted to use this clip tool to identify something like all the banks which falls within the region of interest let's say two so what you can do is you can simply turn off all the other unrequited layers just keep in mind that it's actually not a must to turn them off it's just for your own visualizing purpose it's it makes no difference having them turned on or off for this particular geoprocessing task so now since i know where exactly this clip tool is located at i'm going to go over here or if you were to access it from the toolbox directly you can even open up the arc toolbox go to extract clip from here double click on that and you can get the same exact tool again in this case my input features are going to be banks which are going to get clipped by the boundary of the region of interest 2 so that it will sort of only isolate the banks which are located inside this region of interest 2 and similarly i'm going to change the output location to well this one i should have the previous one i think it would have been good if i put maybe the clip reverse of region of interest 1 but in this case i'm going to say banks region of interest 2 just to make the whole name a bit short and after that i can click ok to run this particular clip tool and if i turned the main banks lay off now you can see that it actually gives me all the banks which are located only inside this region of interest too now again you can notice that whenever we do a certain geoprocessing task the resulting layer will not actually contain all the specific layer styling which we did for this initial layer unfortunately you might have to redo all the styling again every time when you do a different geoprocessing task and it's not that different let's say in this case if i wanted to use triangles to represent my banks which are located inside this region of interest 2 i can change the color like this as well maybe decrease the size just a bit yeah and if i wanted to add the labels you can see that i can select the name of the bank that particular column and maybe i can select this label features in this layer and maybe i can bold it out as well yeah now you can see that very clearly what are the banks which are located inside this region of interest too isn't it yeah all right so i'm going to turn this layer off as well and by the way if you have a look at this arc catalog now you will see those two new layers which you added banks underscore roi2 it's over here and the clip reverse shapefile is also over here and if you think that a layer is not here which is supposed to be here maybe you might be able to just refresh this particular folder simply by right clicking over here and click refresh and then it'll sort of refresh and show you the most updated set of files that you have inside this particular folder and even if you happen to navigate this shapefiles folder using the windows explorer you can see that when we created these banks underscore roi 2 it doesn't mean that it only created this particular dot shp file it means that it created these this entire set of different files which work together in order to make this shape file a functional a fully functional shape file all right i'm going to close this one out so the next geoprocessing tool which i'm going to be using today is intersect tool now this intersect tool can be very efficiently used for identifying areas which are common to multiple shape files in terms of its special extent now over here you can see that this region of interest 1 over this side just belongs to the region of interest 1 and similarly this region of interest 2 over here actually belongs to the region of interest 2 only but if you look at this common boundary over here it belongs to the region of interest 1 as well as the region of interest 2. so what if i were to sort of only isolate this particular common part which is which is actually common to region of interest one and two both we can use the intersect tool to very efficiently mark out those common areas so again i can open up the search panel and type intersect and over here you can see that we get this intersect analysis tool well from now on i think i will directly use this search panel to open up the tools but in case if you are curious to know where this tool is exactly located at you can click on this green color path which will sort of open up the exact address to that particular tool over here but for our convenience i'm just going to actually use the tools from now on directly from the search panel so what i need over here is this intersect analysis tool i'm going to open this one up directly and after that i will specify my input features now over here for the intersection to happen i have two input features of which the first is the region of interest one and then i also have the region of interest two so these are the two layers which will sort of get blended together and it'll extract only the spatial areas which are actually common to both of these different layers and again i'm going to specify the output to be region of interest common common like this and i will save that and i'm going to leave the other settings as default and i can simply click ok and now you can see that it created a new shape file which is of type polygon of course and it created that particular shape file to highlight this common area of interest now if i were to deselect this and turn these two layers off you can see that we have a very precise cut of this common area just like this now this kind of information can be useful especially let's say if i were to now visualize all the banks which are located inside this common area you can see that these are the different banks which actually located inside this this common area and let's say if you wanted to calculate the area in square meters or square kilometers it's actually quite convenient to first create this shape file which corresponds to this common area and then later on do the calculation of the area which we will also be discussing just in a few minutes all right i'm going to turn this one off and this banks lay off as well now i'm going to talk about the union geoprocessing tool now from the intersect tool we saw that we got the common area by intersecting two layers but what if you wanted to get one particular shape file for this entire study area by sort of blending these two together now that can be quite easily done by the union tool i'm going to use this union analysis tool and similar to what we did before i'm going to drag these two layers over here select the corresponding path i'm going to say region of interest union and if i click ok you will see that now it generates one single shape file which includes all these attributes together if i were to turn these two off you can see that it's just one single shapefile but now it's made up of different three different attributes the part which is unique to region of interest one the part which is unique to you region of interest 2 and the common part of region of interest 1 and region of interest 2. now these intersect and union tools actually quite similar to the venn diagrams in probability just as a side note if you if you if you have any experience on that as you can see on the screen let's say if you have two circles called a and b the part which corresponds to the intersection will be actually this middle part because it contains items from both a and b but if we were to talk about union that means we actually talking about this entire a and b circles because that includes everything including the items which are unique to a and items which are unique to b as well as the items which are common to a and b so it's basically the same principle but over here we are applying that for geospatial data all right so the fourth vector geoprocessing tool which i'm going to discuss with you guys today is the dissolve tool now i'm going to use this reverse the original reverse layer in order to explain the application of the dissolve tool now as you can recall if we were to consider let's say this river tuff you can see that the river is actually made out of different segments just like this well let me go ahead and change the color to be a bit of a dark blue so that whenever i highlight some part you will be able to see quite clearly yeah just like this whenever you want to sort of merge attributes based on a common name you can do that using the dissolve tool now for example let's say i i don't want to have different pieces of line segments like this i want to actually have just one continuous line segment by merging all of these pieces together we can simply do that for the river over here and we can merge all of these pieces of line attributes over here based on this common name which is this river eli using this dissolve tool so what i'm going to do is i'm going to let's say say dissolve i'm going to select this dissolve data management tool and from here i'm going to drag this reverse shape file and drop it over here and as soon as you do that you will see that well let me first go ahead and set the path to be reverse dissolve and as soon as i add the corresponding shapefile you will see that a full list of these column headings right over here so it's asking us based on what particular field i would like to perform this dissolve operation in this case i would like to merge all the attributes which have the same river name so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select this name over here so that it'll actually sort of dissolve all of these attributes together to create one single attribute which contains that particular river name all right so i'm going to click ok and you can see that the tool is running and now you can see that we got a new shape file over over here already which is reverse dissolve if i change maybe this color to make it a bit more visually apparent you can see that it's basically the same exact shape file visually as what it was before over here if i turn this one off you can see that the the underlying river layer appears and if i turn this one on you can see that it basically covers the same exact extent but what's different over here is in the attributes table you can see that now the different pieces of polylines of river eli has now been merged together the same goes for river tuff as well and now you can see that it's actually very handy to use this dissolve tool in so many different applications where you want to sort of merge all of these different attributes together isn't it so i'm going to use this dissolve tool once more for this roi union because let me go ahead and turn off this reverse layer let's say if i were to select individual pieces of roi union it's made out of three different polygon attributes just like this but what if i wanted to merge everything together well if you properly understood the concept of dissolve by looking at this attributes table now you might be able to think that we cannot use dissolve tool for this specific case because we don't have any common properties over here in the reverse we had a we had the name of the river as the common property but in this case we do not really have any common properties in it well in such a case what i'm what i would usually do is i would just rather create a new column and just put a random common property let's say if you if you can put number one for all these three we can dissolve it based on that because it's a common property for all these three different pieces of attributes so well we are going to learn something new as well over here how to add new columns to this attributes table go to table options expand this and select add field and over here we need to give the heading i'm going to just give a random name let's say we can say common property something like that and over here we have to select the data type now in this case i'm going to leave the data type to be short integer because if i click ok you can see that by default it actually puts zeros to all these different attributes i don't really care what the value over here is and i don't really care whether the value over here is even a text all i want is actually for these three different items to be the same exact value because then i can specify this common column against which i would like to perform this dissolve operation so that it'll sort of merge all of these three together so again i can go to the search panel and since i already searched for the for the tool before it's just right over here and now i'm going to drag this roi union and drop it over here and in this case well i don't really have to select this like this i'm just going to specify i would like to do the dissolve operation based on this common column which is right over here again i'm going to specify this one to be roi common maybe two like this and if i click okay you can see that now it got rid of all these individual splits in between isn't it and it appears as one single shape file which is of type polygon and we don't have any individual splits in between and this kind of things can be easily achieved using the dissolve tool all right guys so the final basic vector geoprocessing tool that we are going to discuss for this tutorial today is the buffer tool now the buffer tool can actually be used as the name explains itself to create some sort of a buffer based on a given vector now what's meant by creating a buffer is basically an extension of the area starting from a specified point based on specified distance now for example if you wanted to create a buffer for this reverse dissolve let's say if i wanted to create a separate shape file to identify the area which corresponds to a buffer of 1000 meters beyond the left and the right river banks of this river we can simply use the buffer tool to demarcate that kind of thing now again i'm going to use the search panel to create to open up this buffer tool and it's going to be the buffer analysis tool and from here i'm going to specify my input feature which is going to be this river dissolve and i'm going to specify the distance let's say we wanted the buffer to be 1000 meters we specify the unit over here first and from here we can specify i want the buffer to be 1000 meters and i can also specify the location i will say river underscore 1000 meters and now if i click ok you will see that it actually creates out a zone now this zone is of type polygon you can check that from here yeah you can see that it's actually of type polygon and this zone creates a buffer which extends 1000 meters perpendicular to the left and the right of the river for both of these different attributes now if you wanted to do a quick check we have something like this mesher tool which we can use to actually check whether the buffer tool worked correctly or not so what i'm going to do is i'm going to activate this measure tool and over here make sure that i'm going to measure a distance in meters and after that i can zoom in and when you measure the distance always make sure that you measure the distance somewhat perpendicularly to a certain stretch of a river so let's see if i wanted to check the distance from here to up to here it says the length is about 1016 meters well that's because i'm not perfectly able to identify the exact perpendicular line let's say if you were to consider this to be a point the radius of the point will be 1000 meters that's what's meant by that similarly let's say if you go over here and if you try to measure the distance you can see that it's more or less about 1000 meters well it's actually going to be 1000 meters just because i cannot do it by hand we see a bit of an error over here but this is how it creates the buffer of 1000 meters now let's say if i wanted to create a buffer for this roi common i can simply use that tool again and my input feature is going to be this roi common and i would like to identify an area which corresponds to let's say 2.5 kilometers further beyond the outer edge of this polygon i'm going to name this one as roi common 2.5 km well you should keep in mind that arcmap actually does not allow very lengthy names so in case if you notice that your name has been shortened by arcmap well that's the reason because your name was a bit too long so try to keep it short and now if i click ok you will see that it actually creates this buffer of uh 2.5 kilometers for example if i check the distance from here up to here you can see that it's more or less about 2550 meters well that's how the buffer tool works so i guess you guys got the basic idea of how to use these basic vector geoprocessing tools and of course as we do more things we will realize that we can make use of the available hundreds of tools built into arcgis to our advantage to do our tasks very smoothly and efficiently if we know exactly which tool to use and again this is just a basic introductory tutorial but of course if you have been following our our channel for quite some time or if you're interested in actually checking out the other other tutorial videos you will see that we are sort of making use of quite a number of tools which are available uh or which are built into arcgis itself so that's something to keep in mind all right guys so just like that you have reached the end of the part one of this tutorial but we still have a long way to go we've got so many things to cover and we'll be continuing on from part two you can check out the link for the part two down in the description below so i'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 438,293

Rating: 4.9377384 out of 5

Keywords: ArcGIS Desktop tutorial, ArcGIS tutorial, a complete beginner's guide, remote sensing and GIS, arcgis tutorial, arcgis tutorial for beginners, arcgis map tutorial, arcgis online, arcgis pro tutorial, arcgis desktop vs arcgis pro, GIS, gis tutorial for beginners, remote sensing technology, remote sensing applications, introduction to gis using arcgis, introduction to arcgis, introduction to arcgis for beginner, ArcGIS Basic Tools for Beginners, introduction to arcgis 10

Id: BbUctneHfKc

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020