Best 03 ArcGIS Tips How To Navigate and Manage Your Maps
Best 03 ArcGIS Tips How To Navigate and Manage Your Maps

ArcGIS is a mapping program that allows users to create maps for any kind of use. There’s a ton of information out there for beginners, but many tutorials are aimed at students who need step-by-step instructions. This article is for you, the map master — the person who wants to learn more about ArcGIS and how to become more efficient with it. For five tips on how to navigate and manage your maps, see this article.

1. ArcGIS is a powerful mapping program that allows users to create maps for any kind of use.

2. There’s a ton of information out there for beginners, but many tutorials are aimed at students who need step-by-step instructions.

If you’re a beginner, the internet is a great place to start. There’s a ton of information out there, and YouTube is a great resource. But one of the biggest issues with tutorials is that a lot of them have a very student-focused tone, and assume you don’t already know how to do things. In other words, tutorials often get to the point rather quickly. These videos are the equivalent of a lecture on geometry or trigonometry, which isn’t necessarily the goal of a beginner if you ask me. You want to start with building your knowledge base. And the harder you can make a topic, the better the tutorial will be.

An important note — while most tutorials have a step-by-step format, this does not mean you should blindly follow along or build a whole map from scratch. You should pick different techniques and explore and experiment with them. You should also take a step back and make sure you understand the concepts before moving forward.

A good tutorial usually gets you: Once you have these things down, look for a little levity in the videos. They shouldn’t be too hard to understand, but they’re a lot more fun to watch.

Update: This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build a map from scratch. The decent tutorials I’ve found until now focus more on the theory, but not necessarily moving forward. You can explore the geometry or material better. But the theory is necessary to get the basics down. Once you have the basics down, you can customize and re-purpose the techniques to your needs. You do not necessarily need to learn the exact software and hardware, so long as you can follow and understand.

I’m using ArcGIS Pro 10 for my examples, but any GIS program should work with the same concepts. The specific programming language is often called “language”, and if it’s confusing to you, don’t sweat it. Save your sweat for your concepts.

Read more: How To Create A Geographical Map

3. This article is for you, the map master — the person who wants to learn more about ArcGIS and how to become more efficient with it

If you need a mobile-friendly alternative, the free Visual ArcGIS course from Microsoft fully meets the mission, even though map functionality is greatly limited compared to other versions. If you’re stuck with a program that’s too complicated and lacks the basic tools you need, get an expert to help you.

Read more: Knowing More About Edgefield County GIS