ArcGIS Pro Tutorial: How to Format a Layout [2021]

the final step of map creation is creating a layout go into the insert tab and click new layout it will open up a new tab that gives different dimension options for your layout you can also choose to create a custom page size if you want something specific like six inches by six inches when customizing you can change the orientation and the page units in which you're measuring it for my example i decided to do a standard eight and a half by eleven map i like to start with by adding my guides around my page so i usually add them at a quarter but you can add them wherever you would like so i zoom in to each side of the page and place a guide at each of the corners you can do this by right clicking where that measurement is and going add guide then i add the map to the layout just by dragging the map into the layout page or you can drag it into the contents pane i draw it to fit the guides but i like to leave a gap on the top so i can put my title and date information there then i right click the map in the contents pane and then click activate this activates the interior part of your map box which allows you to move around your map so usually to get it zoomed in i just click one of the features and go to zoom to layer that way i don't have to manually zoom in from there you can adjust the size of the map by either scrolling with your mouse or going to that top corner there and hitting those little arrows either zoom in or zoom out and you can fit it to the page make sure you go back to map frame and then click close activation the content plane allows you to make layers invisible so you can see only what you want to see on the map and you can also do this by being in the map tab as well whatever happens in the map tab is automatically updated in the layout tab as well so then you can add your map elements your map should always have a north arrow a scale bar in the legend so let's start with our legend you can draw your legend directly onto your layout and then adjust its size and its placement from there so whatever alias name you have set for your features it will automatically appear as that name in the legend it's best to make sure all the names for your features and your legend are consistent you don't want to have some features all labeled in lowercase or an underscore separating so to fix that you can go into the contents pane right click whatever feature you need to edit and in the name field you can just write out what you want it to be and it will change the alias you can also adjust the order that they appear in the legend by going into the legends section of your contents pane and moving around where you would like things to appear for example i have section 7 above all the other sections but i would rather have it in numerical order so i adjust it accordingly you can also hide fields from your legend by clicking that check box to make them invisible you can also adjust how things appear in your legend by right-clicking your legend and going to properties under show properties you can decide if you want to show the group name the layer name label name you can change the order the arrangement of your legend item so you can have the name first and then the color symbol the text symbol section is where you can change the font type and size so if you didn't want it in ariel which is automatically an ariel you can change that unrelated to the tutorial but i decided to add another legend specifically for my spline because it wasn't really lining up well with the other part of the legend so i decided just to make all the other features in this new legend invisible so i can size up my spline information next to it and make it look aesthetically better the next thing i decided to add was the scale under format you can decide what type of style you would like your scale to appear as as you can tell miles isn't an appropriate unit of measurement for the scale it's too large so you can go into design and change your units to whatever you want i usually use feet and then you can adjust the size of it to be whatever increments that you would like the next thing i decided to add was the north arrow and as you can tell you can automatically change the design of the north arrow to whatever you want so for the scale bar i haven't figured out how to make the back part of it white so it doesn't show the other part of the map so usually how i just get around fixing that is going to insert tab and inserting rectangle and customizing it to be white and just adjusting it until it fits behind the scale bar so my next step is adding the title of the map to do this go into the insert tab and click text and then write whatever you want out onto that text bubble and if you need to edit this text you can either double click the inside of the text box and it will pop up or you can right click the text field and you can choose to edit the text that way you can also edit the text symbol in the upper tab where it says text format and you can choose a different font if you want it bold and define a better size than just adjusting the box as far as text goes usually i just define the title and then i'll have like a subtitle that might describe it a bit more so in this case my title is the site name and then underneath it i decided to describe what i'm splining and then after that i like to put my name or my organization's name and then i put the date that it was done so we know when it was last updated just in case the site is ever dug again or there's more artifacts that were dug after this that you want to add into the information on the site so you don't think that this is a more recent map than it is now we can work on the final step of getting our layout ready so we're going to remove all of the guides first so you can right click one of your guides and click remove all guides and it'll remove all the little blue lines we're going to create an outline for your map so go into the insert tab take the rectangle and drag it outward then create guides at zero zero right click your rectangle then go to properties then click that second symbol there and that will let you adjust the size of your map so change the width and height to match the size of your map drag the outline of your map so it fits that zero zero mark and that way it will be even all the way around remove your guides again check your map to make sure it looks like how you want it to look like then go to the share tab and click layout you can change the file type the dpi and the name make sure you place it in the folder you would like it to be placed and name it something appropriate then click export and then your map will be exported into a format that you chose and now it's ready to be used for powerpoints documents etc

Channel: Delaney Resweber

Views: 424

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Archaeology, GIS Tutorial, ArcGIS Pro

Id: Wn1e35uwq1c

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021