ArcGIS10 Basics 1 of 4

okay welcome this is um ArcGIS 10 introduction these are the basics to the interface this is one part one of four that I intend to do basically this is designed to get you up and started with arcmap whether you're moving from the 993 version up to a 10 or whether you're just starting out with a 10 and the way i'm laying these out is i'm gonna have the four sessions when we'll look at the menus in the windows and the tools and and the different tables and things like that in each of the four sessions adding a little bit more each time so hopefully by the time when we've finished with all four pieces that you'll have a pretty good understanding of the interface of our GIS and how to start using it to do your analysis or to create your maps or whatever it is you'd like to do know first let me just explain what I got up here this is the pretty much a default layout screen wise we have the menus across the top you can see the file edit view bookmarks that type of thing all these menus across the top and then down below we have a toolbar the first one and this is called the standard toolbar and it contains a lot of buttons that are basically just shortcuts to some of those menu options the next toolbar down is called the tools toolbar and this has navigational tools and tools that impact the Muktha of course the mouse function within the window environment within this view window and allows you to look at your data you can pan around and get information and stuff like that and then we have what might be called sub windows or windows within the you know within the arcmap window and then one of these is this table of contents over here on the left side that is actually a window that can be floating or in this case it's docked if I grab the title bar and click on it and drag it it becomes a floating palette type of wooden a floating window and you notice these little blue diamond shapes around here those are docking points and if I go to the left side here I could dock it that way against the left side of the view if I go here I can dock it across the bottom and that type of thing so normally I would dock it over here on the left is where we sort of expect to see it now besides being docked we can also pull the pin on this auto hide push pin now when it's vertical like this its pinned in it stays in position if I pull it and out then it becomes a tab which if I go over to the tab name you see how the pushpin is now horizontal it's been pulled and the window will open up allow me to make any kind of selections and choices I want to make and then it will close when I move away from it so if having a reasonably decent machine that's that takes no time at all to come back and forth if it's a problem just go ahead and dock them and and pushpin and auto lock them in place so they don't auto hide ok so that's a window there table of contents window so we have our view we have some windows we have our toolbars now let's just look at the menus I just wanted hit upon three menus today the file menu very easy one to follow if we could left-click on the menu we get a choices for new and opened these are opening up either a brand new map document or an existing map document and of course if you press open you're gonna get a browser window and and want to go navigate for map document and notice at the bottom here it says M XD for the type and M XD is the extension given to an arc map map document an arc map document does not contain the data okay it contains essentially information on where to find the data what data you want in the map document how the data is being displayed all the different layers that are in the table of contents over here how they're symbolized what windows are open what toolbars are turned on what extensions you're using all that information is stored in a file which is essentially the map document but none of the data and you can create these map documents very easy you can go to file and you say new and it starts a brand new one or you can and you can also say save save let's save the current one you say save as and save as a new name that type of thing and down below we can open any of the more recent map documents that we've been working with the other menu that I want to look at is windows now we've already played a little bit with one of the windows which is table of contents but these allow you to get to some other windows like magnifier and viewer which we'll talk about a little later but right now we're just looking at table of contents and catalog window now there's another window called catalog if I click that open it pops up over over here because that's where it was last docked and it also has a pushpin auto for auto hiding or not the catalog allows me to look at my data if I left click on this geo database right here that's highlighted and there's a visibility box here that expands it or contracts it and here are the feature classes and these are the same feature classes I have in my table of contents and that's I can view my spatial data in that form allows me to rename it allows me to copy it move it into another folder allows me to export it to give it to somebody else in another format all types of things I can do in the catalog window all right now if these windows disappear by accident you hit the plus sign they're not collapsed then you can come back to the Windows menu to open them up or like everything in ArcGIS there's multiple ways there are shortcut buttons in our standard toolbar that will open them up for you just click on them there's one further and see how we get little tips catalog search and table of contents and you can open up that way and lastly I want to look at the help menu if we click on the help menu there's a couple options we're gonna look at arcgis desktop help for now this is the one that's loaded onto your hard drive when you install arcgis and this is the interface we have a couple tabs over here on the Left called contents favorites and search and in contents that broken down into what's new getting started so if you're just getting started into the GIS this is a good place to start out they talk about what GIS is in general and about maps and different ways of looking at data then they go into how it's based on layers and then finally down below we can get into what is ArcGIS and they'll talk about the ArcGIS system for desktop which is the one we're looking at right now and the different extensions that are available okay and then they also have ArcGIS tutorials so that you can go into doing any kind of tutorial that you like different ones available here and a lot more help is also available on this Resource Center which we'll talk about a during another session if you're not sure where the information is that you want to pull out of here you can use the Search tab up here in the top far right and either search for something like table of contents or and you get something like this use the table of contents and this gives you a way to say oh that's the table of contents these are what the different items are we have different ways of looking at the table of contents we have this thing called a data frame we have layers we have symbology or legends and we could collapse these and so forth and you can see all of this inside of this table of contents help page and if you see something you like you see you say cheese there's a lot of information here I need to be able to come back to this over and over and over again you can make it a favor by clicking on your favorite tab and come right down here and you can either rename it which I would suggest since the current topic doesn't mean a whole heck a lot to me and you could simply name it table of contents which I've already done and then say add so table TLC table of contents let's do it that way okay so we can go to any one of these so then if you want to look at table contents in full again just double click on your favorites you know take you right to the page pretty standard for a lot of the online help now okay let's close that so those are the three menus I want to attack look at we talked about the the windows a little bit we have this data View window right here we have our table of contents window we have our catalog window the other one we haven't talked about too much is the attribute window which I'll get to in a minute but first I want to look at some tools start getting us to look at the map a little bit okay toolbar this is a standard this is the tools toolbar and there's some navigational tools here now as we get out further there's some tools for making selections and identifying some other more unique tools but right now we're going to look at these tools on the left side which are the navigational tools and the plus sign does magnifying glass is very obvious I think it allows you to zoom in you just click once zoom in a fixed amount but we want to do is click and drag you know draw you a box around the interest you can zoom into that and the minus on the magnifying glass zooms out the hand sign is a pan just grab it and pan around and the panning does not change the scale and you can check that out up here this is where you would find the scale of your current view if you want a specific scale there's a little drop-down list right here just click on that and you could pick us a standard scale or you can customize that list if you want to so if you want to look at the standard scale say maybe five hundred thousand that's a five hundred thousand that if we want to look at well what's the 750 scale there we go so we're seeing at one to seven hundred fifty thousand scale as we pan around over here to the right of the pan tool there's a couple others for fixed zoom in and fixed zoom out that just incrementally steps you up and down about 10 percent and then there's this tool here which if I do something nice and if I'm zoomed in and I want to go just step back I can hit the blue arrow they'll go back to the previous extent and I'll keep going back and I can go back and forth different extents that way by using the blue arrows and then finally some invariably this is gonna happen to you somewhere along the way you're gonna be in so far you have no idea where you are no in that case what you can do is you can hit this little tool right here called full extent and it will zoom you all the way out to the full extent of all your datasets now I'm gonna do that now and you're gonna see an interesting effect now what you're seeing is another feature of arcgis 10 and that is something called a base map over here I have added a base map to my normal datasets to give a little bit of background information a little bit of context and I grabbed this base map right from the web and I'll show you later how to do that but when I went to that full extent of course it included the base map so that's not really where I want to be right now so instead I'll hit this go back to previous zoom and I will instead use another option and the option I'm gonna use is within the table of contents and it's attached to the layers that are in there now in the table of contents these are called layers cities layer counties layer base map layers and they're inside this data frame that's called layers so if I right-click on say a layer in here I will get a context menu there are many context menus associated with many components of our map and what you want to do is if you really don't know what's what to do perhaps go to the thing that you want to modify or that you want to work with and right-click on it and see what happens there's probably a context menu there in this case I want a context menu for that specific layer and I can use the zoom to option for that layer if i zoom to that zoom to my counties layer and I see my base map in the background which we now know covers the whole world but we are only looking at a very small portion of it and I'll show you later how you can go out to the web with ArcGIS 10 and grab those base maps free from ArcGIS online okay so how do we control how things look in here we do that within this table of contents we can use our zooming tool zoom into here a little bit more and then we can see our table of contents if I check click on the check for cities I turn them off click on the check for counties I turn them off click on the check for base map it turns off that's how you control the visibility of different layers if I want to see well I see counties are drawn in red but I don't see it over here if I want to see the legend for the layer I click on the plus sign to the left to expand it out to the left for cities I could see cities are drawn like this counties are drawn as open boxes with red borders and the base map is just drawn I have there's no control on that it's actually an image now the other thing we want to be able to do is add data we want to be able to add data into here as well so let's see how we can add some data so if we go up to the add data button it's just big yellow layer symbol with a plus on it and you click on that and you'll get a browser button a browser dialogue and that dialog will allow you to go anywhere to any connection that you have any folder and you can see all I have all these different folder connections and I can go to my default connection and pick out a data set to add in this case let's add our roads data so we have roads and notice it came in it didn't come in turned on because that's a certain option I have set so I'd turn on the roads now here are the road data sets right here here are the counties on top roads are a funny kind of color let's change that a little bit if I just left right click on the symbol I can change its color very easily so maybe we should make the roads kind of a grey well--that's may not have been a good choice let's go for black there we go there are the roads and they're a little confusing because there's a base map of roads underneath so we can actually turn them off now and so we have the roads in black we have the counties here in red and we have the cities on there and notice where it brought the ropes they did two things he gave it a color by default as symbology by default because it was line data it made it a straight line solid and gave it a random color and I put it between cities and counties now the reason it did that is because arcmap if you've noticed but noticing it draws from the bottom up it lays down that base map it then draws the counties it then draws the roads now and then then drove through the cities on top and that's because things like base map that's an image it's solid it's gonna block out anything underneath it counties is a polygon now a polygons can be filled or they can be hollow this one happens to be hollow but it could have been filled in which case they wouldn't want it but the roads they put roads above polygons and then it puts cities above roads so there's a hierarchy in the display of these feature classes and ArcGIS will try and maintain that and put it in and at its highest possible location without damaging the hierarchy you can of course move it around so let me show you how you do that so say we want to add another data set the towns in here so instead of going up and using this tool I'm gonna go over and use catalog and into the catalog window one of the nice things about it is I can find these data sets like the roads and the towns but I can do more than that I can just bring them in and I can either drop them right here in the view in which case it will do the same thing I did with the roads and put it in by default so let me see where it goes boom we'll do that and it's it put it right in here put it it's high on the hierarchy so it could without interfering with lying data and I clicked it on so there's my town dataset I've lost my counties if I turn off road you see I just had towns in the cities I've lost my counties and that's because towns is covering them up remember it draws from the bottom up so I want to reorder this it's very easy to reorder things and the table of contents you'd left click on the layer name and click and drag it wherever you want so I'll put it under counties and notice it's blocked out the base map so we might just well turn the base map off now so now we have towns we have the county layers laying on top as a ha polygon we have the road layer we can add in there and we have cities maybe we should change the road color yet again okay the way again I'm getting to changing those colors is just the right click on the symbol and I get a little color palette I can choose pick and choose from there's much more in symbology we can get into and we will later okay so that's really how we can move things around we can use our catalog we can navigate a tree over here and find our data set add data pan and zoom the only other thing I want to cover before we close off is the attribute table these data that we have on on our screen here in our view it's just showing the spatial location of things the location of the city the bounding bounding or the township it's not showing us any of the background information the data associated with it that's in an attribute table so let's look at the one for cities and the way you can look at the attribute table for a layer issue go to the layer and you right click on its name and you get that context menu where we were able to zoom to the layer four counties in this case and also it allows us to remove the layer if we're tired of it don't need it or to copy it if we want to know the copy of it and a little later I'll show you the advantages of copying a layer but down a little further down is open attribute table if we click on that we'll get an accurate table opening up for this layer now this is the data that's attached to every every feature in that feature class so every in this case it's cities the layers name of the tables name right down here its cities if I click on any one of these let's pick up Utica should be visible here it is over here in a far right there's Utica notice I have a record here with data associated with a feature class here there's a one to one relationship for every feature in your feature class layer there's going to be a record in your feet your class attribute table across the top we have field names city name city state number elevation population associated with each of the features and then down going down we have the individual records so if we go down a little further Syracuse is here there's Syracuse and them to be average and even so forth so every one of these records relates to a feature class and you can't have one without the other and if you delete one the other will go in this attribute table again can be docked it can be just like any of the other windows and it can also we can remove our selection and there is also an options table options menu or you can think of as a context menu for tables in which where you could do many things including select by these attributes you can add fields so remember these are fields you can add out this way you can't touch these object and shape or lock down by the system but anything out this way you can modify to your heart's content and recalculate and so forth or add new fields or export the data out or control how it appears things like that and we'll get into those a little bit later so basically that's the first introductory lesson on just getting around ArcGIS map and figure out where some of the things are located and how to get started on the next session we'll look at a little bit into bookmarks how to do some layouts how to select elements a little bit more on where this data is coming from that we see in here and these table of contents how we can find out where it's coming from and a little bit more about it geo database and then finally what do you do when you have more than one attribute table opened and we can rearrange those and things like that

Channel: Iris Cornell

Views: 578,951

Rating: 4.8846707 out of 5

Keywords: ArcGIS 10, Introduction to ArcGIS, ArcGIS Basics

Id: ekmyWkAP4eI

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2012