Hacks 1-5
Hacks 6-10
Hacks 11-15
Hacks 16-20
Hacks 21-25
Hacks 26-30
Hacks 31-35
Hacks 36-40
Heavens, how has it come this this? 45 one-minute map hacks? If you are pushing pixels in a GIS then maybe some of these little tidbits will be helpful. At the very least, you’ll have only wasted five minutes of your allotted time on this earth perusing the most recent batch. Shall we?
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Ah labels. Are you ever working in ArcGIS Pro and you are deep in the label weeds and just need to know which layers do and don’t have layers active? There’s a handy dandy view in the table of contents for that!
P.S. If you like the map style in this demo, you can find it here.
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We’ll just keep singing the praises of the rapturous ability to have varying amounts of transparency within a gradient. Sometimes you just want to show some portion of a raster. There are lots of tools to help you isolate a range of pixels, but if your goal is purely visual, then just let the slider do its beautiful work.
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Sometimes an idea comes to you in the night and you just lay there working it out in your mind and you just can’t wait to try it out the next morning. Behold…
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Who can know the depths of ArcGIS Pro? In this case, I had just completed a video showing how to make a before/after comparative layout, when Aubri Kinghorn, knower (and maker) of all things layout, politely reached out with this message…
“Would you like a layout tip that would make your life even easier next time you want to do Before-After layout? Using map frame constraints can help you quickly get 2 map frames to match extents, center points, or scales. And, if you adjust one the other automatically adjusts.”
We’re all in this together! Thanks Aubri.
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Last year we made an ArcGIS Pro project available so educators (or the downright curious/devious) could make orange peel projection illustrations right in an honest to goodness GIS. But we never made the style available until now (in case you want to grow your own orange map with all manner of data). Here’s a fun little video walking through some of the elements.
There it is, another five minutes whiled away with map hacks! We hope you learned some tricks, time-savers, and fun-boosters. Do you have ideas for short demos that the community needs to know about? Share them in your comments, we’d love to hear about them and maybe roll them into future hacks.
Hacky Mapping! John
Excellent small series of blog posts about projections Heather!
Brief but really concise, clear and to the point. Should be of help to many.
Thank you very much!
This is excellent.
Thank you very much.
Just Perfect Heather
Hi,I am Mujuni Desdery ,Cartographer ,currently work with Geological Survey of Tanzania. I have challenge on using both Geographical Coordinate System & Projected Coordinate System Always I made Georeference Raster with GCS , I create a Layers with PCS ,(in File Geodatabase).Finally at Layout stage I should display both GCS & PCS There error on displaying both GCS & PCS on fixed final layout Map.Main displayed at GCS looks like miss or overlaping either Easting or Northing of GCS . but PCS looks perfect Any one who experience this fatal, please help me to overcome it. …May be I was… Read more »
Hi Mujuni,
This article about projection on the fly and transformations might help: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-pro/mapping/projection-on-the-fly-and-geographic-transformations/ It may be that a geographic transformation is not available or you need to use a different one.
I also recommend posting your question on GeoNet, where more people can see and respond: https://community.esri.com/groups/coordinate-reference-systems
Please include the coordinate system used by your map and each layer, and include a picture or two of the problem you are seeing.
Hi,
Great post for Coordinate System, just one comment for last section (What’s the difference between a spatial reference and a coordinate system?). Actually there are difference between them as follow:
– Spatial Reference for 2D data = Horizontal Projected Coordinate System +XY Resolution+ XY Tolerance
– Spatial Reference for 3D data = Horizontal Projected Coordinate System + XY Tolerance + Vertical Coordinate System + Z Resolution +Z Tolerance
based to this Documentation:
https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/manage-data/geodatabases/the-properties-of-a-spatial-reference.htm
Thanks,
Mohamed Magdy
Thanks for the informative article. Coordinate Systems and Projections are topics that we have to keep revisiting because they can be complicated and it is easy to forget some of the details. It is kind of like math in a way. You think you know it but when you dive in after a break you realize you don’t know it as well as you thought
Thank you for your hard working, Heather! It’s really great article 🙂
Hello everyone.
Thanks a lot for this beneficial article.
I just have a quick question. Should all the data and layers in a map have the same GCS and PCS? I have put together two layers in a map whit different GCS and PCS to see what happened and I am able to see both layers and apparently, it works well with the location.
Thanks a lot!
Sara
Hi Sara, The short answer is yes: once you’ve decided which data to use, it’s best to use the Project tool to make sure all data layers and the map use the same coordinate system. This answer is especially true if you’ll be doing any kind of spatial analysis. You can think of GIS analysis like a scientific experiment: you want to have full control over all of the variables, and the coordinate system is an important variable. Therefore, to have full confidence in your results, you should keep this variable consistent. But in my opinion, if you’re simply visualizing… Read more »
Thanks for your clear answer!