Introduction
to ArcGIS Desktop
Prepared by
Center for Research in Water Resources
University of Texas at Austin
September 2012
Table of Contents
Goals
Computer and Data Requirements
Procedure
1. Viewing Shapefiles in ArcMap
2. Viewing Shapefiles in ArcCatalog
3. Using Basemaps from ArcGIS
Online
4. Accessing and querying attribute data
5. Selecting features from a feature class
6. Mapping annual evaporation
7. Making a chart
8. Making a map layout
9. Share in ArcGIS Online
Items to be turned in.
Goals
of the Exercise
This
exercise introduces you to ArcMap and ArcCatalog. You use these applications to create a map of
pan evaporation stations in
Computer
and Data Requirements
To
carry out this exercise, you need to have a computer, which runs ArcGIS Desktop
version 10.1. You will also need and
ESRI Global Account to enable you to login to ArcGIS Online. If you do not
already have an ESRI Global Account, go to: https://www.arcgis.com/home/createaccount.html
and create one.
You
will be working with the following spatial datasets during this exercise:
- A
polygon shapefile of the counties of
- A point shapefile of
pan evaporation stations, called Evap
- A polygon shapefile
of the state of
These shapefiles consist of several files (e.g. evap.dbf,
evap.shp, evap.shx). You can get them from this zip file: http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/giswr2012/Ex1/Ex1Data.zip
You need
to establish a working folder to do the exercise on. This can be in c:\temp,
your student directory, or on a memory stick attached to the machine you are
working on. To establish a new account at the CE Information Technology Support
and Services, go to http://www.caee.utexas.edu/itss/ and select LRC User Accounts. If you don't yet have a regular Login account at
the LRC, get a temporary guest login to do the exercise.
After
you have downloaded the zip file Ex1Data.zip
double click on the file and you should see the Winzip,
Alladin Stuffit utility, or other zip utility to open
the file on your computer (if it doesn’t open you’ll have to unzip
this file on a computer that has a zip utility installed). Extract all files
from the zip file to the working folder that you’ve set up to do this
exercise. You should end up with a file list that looks something like this. You
may see these data within a sequence of folder names, and if so, click on each
folder down through the sequence until you locate the required files.
Procedure
Please
note that the following procedure is a general outline, which can be followed
to complete this lesson. However, you are encouraged to experiment with the
program and to be creative.
1. Viewing Shapefiles in ArcMap
A
shapefile is a homogenous collection of simple
features that do not contain topological information. A shapefile
includes geometric features and their attributes. The attributes are contained
in a dBase table, which allows for the joining with a feature based on the
attribute key.
Open ArcMap and select the A new empty map option.
Use the Add Data button
to add the data for this exercise to the ArcMap
display.
Navigate to the folder,
which contains the data, and select all three files at once by using the shift
key. Click the Add button to import the data. If you are using a network drive
to obtain your files use the Connect to
folder button to add the network drive to the ones that ArcMap
is accessing so you can get to the files.
Click on each of the
three shape files so that they are highlighted
and add them to your ArcMap display.
All the themes are
highlighted and Texas lies above counties so you cannot see the counties
theme. Click on the List by Drawing
Order button in the Table of Contents page:
Click in the Table of Contents area below the
feature class names so that three themes are no longer highlighted, then click
on the counties theme and drag it up so that it is located above the Texas
theme. You’ll then get a display
showing the counties.
To change the appearance
of a map display, you can access the Symbology menu just by double clicking on the Symbol
displayed in the ArcMap
Layers, and you’ll get the Symbol
Selector window
Click on the symbol
color box, make your selections for the Fill Color and the Outline
Color, and click OK, twice. You can show the outline of the State of Texas
more distinctly by using the No Color
symbology for the Fill Color and then
changing the Outline Color to Green and the Outline Width to 2.
Drag the Texas layer
above the Counties layer, and you’ll see that the Counties are not obscured
as they were before and the State of Texas is highlighted with a nice Green
outline! We are green in Texas!
To Save
this map display, use File/Save As
in ArcMap and save the resulting file as Ex1.mxd.
Save your work in ArcMap by choosing File/Save and, after navigating
to your working directory, naming the file Ex1 (the file will be
assigned the extension mxd). When you do this, the Ex1.mxd file contains the file location
of the geodatabase and the symbology
you’ve chosen for the map display. You can shut down Arc Map and then
invoke Arc Map again and reload the same map display by clicking on Ex1.mxd.
Note, however, that if in the mean time you’ve relocated your data, ArcMap will go back to where you had it at the time the map
file was saved.
________________________________________________________________________
Helpful Tip:
If you open your ArcMap Ex1.mxd file later from another location in your
file system, you may see a red exclamation points beside your feature classes.
If this happens, in ArcMap, right click on the
feature class use Data/RepairData Sources to
relocate the file location where the corresponding data are now stored and your
map will display correctly again.
2. Viewing Shapefiles
in ArcCatalog
Open ArcCatalog by clicking on the
Catalog tab on the right hand side of the map display
Click on the
“Folder Connections” button and navigate to where your data are
stored.
If you right click on a
data layer, you can obtain an Item Description
Select the Preview tab and then Geography to see a map of the feature
class
And then select the Table view
The attributes FID,
Shape, Area and Perimeter are standard attributes for ArcGIS feature
classes. The units of the area and
perimeter are defined from the map units of the feature class.
If you right click on a
feature class and then select Properties
And select XY Coordinate System which shows you
the parameters of the coordinate system of these data, NAD83, or the North American Datum of 1983. This provides a rather complicated set of
parameters that we’ll learn more about later.
If you click on the Fields tab, you’ll see a formal
definition of each attribute field with its Field Name and Data Type. In this case, ObjectID means a special data
type that indexes each feature as an object in the GIS, Geometry means that the Shape field has geographical coordinates
stored in it, and Float and Double mean decimal numbers in single
or double precision, respectively. There
are some other data types such as Short and Long integers, Text and Date types, that we’ll encounter later in the course.
Click on the other two
data layers, Evap
and Texas to preview them also.
3. Using Base Maps from ArcGIS Online
Up to this point we have
just used local GIS data in our display.
Let’s instead using base maps from the ArcGIS Online. Use Add
Basemap:
Click on “Streets”, in the bottom row of
maps. You’ll see a background map appear
behind your Texas display. Pretty cool!
If you get a message
asking about Hardware Acceleration, say Yes to it.
You should see a result
like that shown below. If your BaseMap does not show
up, use the Refresh tool 
in the bottom left hand corner of the ArcMap display to redraw the map and the BaseMap should then show up.
To quickly get the map
to center on Texas, right click on the Texas layer and select Zoom to Layer
Click on the Counties
theme and use the Symbol Selector to change the Fill Color to “No Color”
so we can see through it to the background map, and the new display
appears. Let’s examine Travis
County.
Use the Zoom in button to select a box around Travis County
Click the counties layer
to turn off the county boundaries since the background map already shows the
county boundaries
Zoom in to Travis County
by Austin in the center of Texas, and let’s examine the evaporation site
by Lake Travis to the Northwest of the city.
Notice how more interesting information appears as you zoom in closer.
Lets label the sites with their
names. Right click on the Evap theme and
select Properties at the bottom of
the display that appears.
Labels tab and for the Label Field, select Station, and 16 point as the type size.
Hit Apply and then Ok, to close this window.
Now, right
click on the Evap theme again and select Label Features, and you’ll see a
nice label Mansfield Dam appear by
the site next to Lake Travis.
Click on the symbol for
the Evap points and use the Symbol Selector to change
the size of the points to 8 and the color to Red. Now we’ve got a nice map that shows the
location of our observation site labeled with its name.
If you zoom in a bit
closer, you can see just where the site is located near Lake Travis. Mansfield Dam is the dam that is at the
downstream end of Lake Travis. You can
even see the access roads you’d use to go to this site.
Now, lets look at some imagery for this location. Proceeding as you did before to get the
Street map, use Add BaseMap,
to add data for Imagery Turn off the
Street Map so you can see the imagery.
And now you’ll see
the same information displayed against a background map of orthoimagery,
and lets zoom in a bit to see more detail. For the Evap theme, I have used the Properties/Label to change the color of
my site labels from black to blue to make them easier to see against the image
background. This is really cool
stuff! You can really get a sense of
context about where this observation site is located.
Use File/Save As to save this new map display as Ex1.mxd so that you can get it back later if you need it.
4. Accessing and
Querying Attribute Data
Lets go back to the view we had earlier of Travis
County. Use the Go Back to Previous
Extent arrow
to step back through
the views we have just been working on, and turn off the Image basemap so that you can see the Streets basemap
again. Change the Label color for the evap sites back to Black.
Numerical
and text information stored in the fields of the geodatabase
tables are called attributes. To access attribute data of the feature
classes at a specific location:
Click on
the Identify tool
Highlight the feature
class you are interested in the Table of Contents (Evap),
and then click on the feature on the map you are interested in. In the Identify window that pops up
you’ll see the attributes of that particular feature. In this instance, what you see is that the
data for Lake, cover the range from 2003 to 2010, the latitude and longitude
are 30.403 and -97.917, and the values from Jan through Dec are the mean
monthly evaporation recorded at this location, in inches, whose annual total is
an Annual of 69.36 inches.
These are pan
evaporation data recorded using an instrument like that shown below. The evaporation data were obtained from the
Texas Water Development Board. Only
data from 2001 onwards is used since the TWDB has quality control checked that information. Monthly
evaporation is found by averaging the daily values of evaporation read from the
pan, and multiplying by the number of days in the month. If a month has fewer than 20 daily values
recorded, it is excluded from the dataset.
Only years with valid monthly data for all 12 months are used in
computing the mean monthly and mean annual pan evaporation data shown in the
attribute table.
Viewing
an Attribute Table
To access attribute data
of an entire layer, in ArcMap:
right click on the Evap
layer name in the table of contents, and select Open Attribute Table:
And if you scroll down the
resulting Table and click on FID 24 you’ll see the record that
contains the attributes of the Lake Travis station that you identified earlier.
Click on this to select it, and you’ll see the corresponding point
selected in the map – this is a key idea of GIS – map features are
described by records in attribute tables.
To Clear a Selected
feature and select a new one, use: Selection/Clear Selected Features in
the ArcMap toolbar:
5. Selecting features from a feature class
Selecting
features from a feature class involves choosing a subset of all the features in
the class for a specific purpose. Feature selection can be made from a map by
identifying the geometric shape or from an attribute table by identifying the
record. Regardless of how you select an object, both the shape in the map and
the record in the attribute table will be selected. Make sure that the Evap theme is highlighted in the Table of Contents and then
Click on the Select Features by
Rectangle tool
If
zoom back a little bit and drag a box over the three evaporation sites in the
Highland Lakes reservoir system,
you’ll see both records highlighted on
the map and in the attribute table. I’ve turned off the Counties layer
and used Show selected records at
the bottom of the Attribute Table to just show the three highlighted stations.
To clear your selection,
choose Selection/Clear Selected Features.
Clicking on Show all records, then displays all the records in the
attribute table again.
Let’s
suppose we want to map the values of annual evaporation recorded at the
stations, rather than just symbolizing them by their location. Right click on the Evap layer and select Properties/Symbology
Show Quantities/Graduated Symbols with the Value field of Annual, and make the Template
color blue.
I have
turned off all the other layers and added the Topographic base map to get the image below. Very cool!
7. Making a Chart
You can see from the map
that there is some tendency for lower evaporation values near the coast and to
the East and higher values to the West. Charts
are useful because they allow you to visualize trends in data. Click on Table Options
at the top left of the Table and
select Create Graph.
You will be making a Vertical
bar chart (the default option). The next screen will allow you to indicate the
data to be used in the graph. Here is a graph of the Annual Evaporation (Annual) of all the stations plotted
against the Longitude of the station.
You can see that there is a general trend of the evaporation increasing
as you go from East to West in Texas. The
color of the chart bars is blue, the same as the map points.
Click off “Add to Legend” to get rid of the legend on the right hand
side.
Hit Next and edit the graph properties to make them nicer. Add a title Evaporation and Longitude and relabel the
vertical axis Evaporation (Inches)
Click Finish, and you’ve created a
graph linked to mapped features in ArcMap. If you create the same kind of graph for
Evaporation and Latitude, you can see that there isn’t a tendency for
evaporation to vary with latitude in Texas, as there is for variation of evaporation
with longitude.
Save
your ArcMap document Ex1.mxd so that you can retain this display.
Graphing in Excel
Another graphing
option is to make a chart in Excel using the dBase tables given by the
evaporation shapefile. Open the evaporation
attributes table Evap.dbf as a table in Excel. Use Files of Type: dBase
files in Excel to focus only on .dbf tables when you open the table.
When you
open the file, you’ll see that the Station name is very wide (254
characters). Right click on this column
in Excel and select Column width of 30 characters to correct this.
Select the stations you want to plot, copy
their records to a new worksheet, delete the columns you don't need there, and
then create a chart. Here is an example chart created this way.
8. Creating a Map Layout
Now we
are going to create a formal map of evaporation in Texas that includes the
charts that we’ve created.
Change
the format of the display window from Data View to Layout View by
clicking on View/Layout View,
If your
Layout doesn’t display properly in ArcMap, hit 
at the bottom of the map display to refresh
it.
Reduce the size of the
data frame in the layout (i.e., rectangle where the spatial data is contained)
-- to make room for the graph -- by clicking on the graph and moving its
handlers. If you have a zoomed in view in Arc Map, you’ll get the same
image in in the Layout. To move the
location of your map, go back to the Data View and use the Pan tool
to move your map around. When you switch back to the Layout View the
new map location will be displayed.
I have turned off the Basemap to make the map easier to interpret.
Keep saving your ArcMap document as you proceed through the map making steps
so that if you mess up something you can get back the work you’ve already
done.
To insert the ArcMap Chart into the Layout, right-click on the upper blue
bar at the top of the Chart and select Add to Layout. Move and resize
the graph as necessary. If you want to copy your graph from Excel, highlight
the graph, and click on Copy in
Excel, then Paste in ArcMap and your graph should appear in the map layout.
You can also insert a North Arrow and a Scale Bar by using the Insert
menu in ArcMap.
When you put up the
scale bar you can select the distance units to be displayed. I have used miles.
You can add a Title or Text with the text tool 
shown next to the line draw tool.
The text displays in very small font sizes.
Select and click on them, and use Properties
to resize them.
Your map might look like
this:
You can export your map
from ArcGIS using File/Export Map
from the ArcMap menu, and you can store this as Ex1.emf in your data file. Then you can
add it to a Word document using Insert/Picture/From
File and load this emf file, as shown below. Pretty
cool!
Then you can add it to a
Word document using Insert/Picture/From
File and load this emf file, as shown below. Pretty
cool!
Helpful Tip:
A more general procedure
is to simply copy the screen to the clipboard and crop out the part that you
want, saving it to a file for later use. That is how all the images in this
exercise were prepared. To copy any image, use the Snipping Tool in All Programs/Accessories on your
Windows Desktop interface
Drag the cursor around the area that you want to capture and
you’ll see it copied into a new display, then use Paste
to insert this snippet
into a specific location in your document. If you only want to capture the active frame,
press Alt + Print Screen and then
Paste it to the new document.
This approach can also
be used to add a map to a chart in Excel:
The manipulations just
described transfer objects from one application to another.
To
be turned in: An ArcMap map layout in it showing a
map of Texas with gages, coupled with a graph showing monthly evaporation data
plotted from the gages. In the
presentation of information on maps and charts it is important to include
sufficient labeling detail so that the information can be clearly and
unambiguously interpreted. You should
include a scale bar to indicate distance, a north arrow to indicate direction
and labels or legends with units wherever they are needed to interpret map or
quantitative values.
Sign in to your account
in ArcGIS Online from ArcMap:
If the problem is that
you get an 'invalid username/password' error when trying to log in from ArcGIS
Desktop even though you can log in fine online, follow https://www.arcgisonline.com/home/signup.html
and following the signup steps. This authenticates your ESRI Global Account for
use in ArcGIS Online and allocates you space to upload files into your “My
Content” folder within ArcGIS Online.
Use File/Map Document Properties to fill out information about your
map. It’s good to fill in as many
of the fields possible so that your map is well documented. Use relative pathnames for the data and make
a thumbnail so that your map can be summarized as a small image.
Close all your charts
since they don’t seem to be preserved when you save the map package.
Share your information
as a Map Package – this includes both the map and the data used to create
it.
I have called my Map
Package “Texas Evaporation”
You’ll be asked to
Save your map document again. Say Yes.
And after a little bit, your Map Package will be created.
And if you go to http://www.arcgis.com, login with your ESRI Global
Account username and password, and look under My Content, you’ll see that you now have a Map Package there.
If you click on the
Title “Texas Evaporation”, your package will open and you can see
that its accessible in ArcGIS Version 10. You can also choose to Share your package
publicly if you want to do so.
Close ArcGIS on your
desktop, and choose Open in ArcGIS 10
for Desktop in the web browser, and here is your
information again freshly displayed in ArcMap! Pretty cool!
In this way, you can share your data and maps in a formatted form with
your colleagues. Later we’ll show
how to save map services that can be opened on the web without having ArcGIS
Desktop locally available.
To
be turned in: A screen capture of your map package displayed in ArcGIS Online.
___________________________________________________________________________
Summary
of Items to be Turned In:
(1) An ArcMap map layout
in it showing a map of Texas with gages, coupled with a graph showing evaporation
data plotted from the gages. In the
presentation of information on maps and charts it is important to include
sufficient labeling detail so that the information can be clearly and
unambiguously interpreted. You should
include a scale bar to indicate distance, a north arrow to indicate direction
and labels or legends with units wherever they are needed to interpret map or
quantitative values. Let’s see
some nice cartography!!
(2)
A screen capture of your map package
displayed in ArcGIS Online.
The
assignment is due in a week from the date it was assigned in class. Please print out your items to be turned in
and bring them to class to turn in to the instructor.