GIS Tips & Tricks
We have lots of good ideas.
Our range of expertise is not limited to local government: GIS training, avoiding angry Bulls, fishing in Wisconsin. Our Blog will keep you entertained and learning.
Learning a new language can be intimidating at first, because it’s hard to find your bearings. This blog aims to help you over the hurdle of learning Arcade basics.
Arcade is a portable, lightweight, secure expression language developed by Esri to enhance workflows and user experience within ArcGIS applications.
Looking for some new professional goals for the new year? If you’ve not yet made the move to ArcGIS Pro from ArcMap, may I suggest that you place that on the top of your list? We all know the time is coming where you’ll need to use ArcGIS Pro for most workflows - some of us were early adopters, some reluctant adopters, and some of us are still holding out.
Are you new to the ArcGIS Pro Parcel Fabric and want to map subdivisions? Find your bearings here with these 5 easy steps. First, review the subdivision plat and legal description. Before you jump into your Parcel Fabric and start editing your Land Records, you will want to read and review the subdivision plat. The plat is the legal record filed with the jurisdictional authority (County Recorder of Deeds, etc.) and is the basis for surveying and mapping a property.
Enterprise geodatabase versioning is an integral part of Enterprise GIS workflows and allows for flexible and manageable workflows for multiuser editing scenarios. Branch versioning is a new type of geodatabase versioning available to Esri users. This new type of versioning has been reconfigured to alleviate some of the pain-points when using traditional versioning and relies on a services-based platform for version use and management. The branch versioning configuration also provides the backbone needed to extend available add-ons/usability of GIS data. Certain solutions like the Utility Network, Trace Network, Parcel Fabric, and Indoors within ArcGIS Enterprise all require data to be branch versioned. Another immensely powerful add-on for branch versioned data is the Validation and Batch Calculation Attribute Rules. Branch versioning may be a great solution when evaluating current and anticipated workflows and can open the door to a new age of capabilities for Enterprise GIS data.
The Data Loading Tools are a free solution provided by Esri designed to help simplify and streamline the ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process from a source dataset to a target dataset. The tools are packaged as a python add-in for ArcGIS Pro and help simplify migration by harnessing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Within the spreadsheets migration mapping from the source schema to target schema can be set up for feature classes, fields, and even coded value domains. This toolbox is most used to assist with migrating data into the robust Utility Network schema, but it can be used for all ETL tasks!
With the coronavirus spreading rapidly, its high-time the GIS community invoke its power of location analytics to help fight off the destructive spread. Tools are readily available to locate, track, and even predict when and where the virus will spread. Esri has numerous resources available such as pre-configured web apps, operations dashboards, and solutions deployment tools. One of the major provisions that have made is incorporation of the Coronavirus initiative into ArcGIS Hub basic so everyone with an ArcGIS Online account has access to the tools and there is no need to purchase the Hub Premium edition
Are you a rule follower or a rule breaker? We’ve got both in our office (I won’t mention any names…) but we all agree that Attribute Rules in ArcGIS Pro are the types of rules we can get behind. There are three rule types you can use to help keep your data in check: Calculation, Constraint, and Validation. Today I’m going to give some examples of creating and applying Calculation rules. If you’re an ArcMap user, this will look a lot like using Attribute Assistant, but better.
Are you an occasional Esri software user that is needing to ramp up your game? Maybe its been a couple of years since you dabbled with the GIS software and you have a project that needs a little geospatial touch. One of the questions you may find yourself asking is "What is the difference between ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro"?
Are you ArcGIS Pro-ready? System Requirements Lab has provided a tool (available here or at the system requirements page for ArcGIS Pro) that produces a detailed report in a matter of seconds showing how your system stacks up to the minimum and recommended requirements for running ArcGIS Pro. Please watch this video for more information on how you can easily check your system requirements for Pro.
Hoops Tracker is a Esri Story Map that displays information for the 2018 Class 1A and 2A Boys Basketball Tournaments in separate web mapping applications, paired with a view of IHSA's interactive ScoreZone web page and other IHSA links.
A fresh calendar year is upon us, and one of my goals this round is to give ArcGIS Pro a legitimate shot at being the go-to desktop GIS application. (TBD...)
As increasingly more development goes into ArcGIS Pro, we as GIS professionals are beginning to actually consider the gradual shift away from ArcMap. Many of us have dabbled with Pro by now, and many of us have been more or less disappointed by either our machines’ lack of drawing performance or the program's lack of familiar places or functions.
I work for a living, but in the off times I still play with this technology, so I have a Premium Geocaching subscription. This allows me to query their data in circular buffers and return a GPX file. After about 27 of these queries, I was confident that I had all of the cache locations I wanted. Running a few geoprocessing functions, I dropped any duplicates and union-ed these points to county polygons to get the number within each county. This data are reflected in the Classified inset map. What am I talking about? Geocaching of course. If you're reading this tech blog there's a pretty good chance you already know what geocaching is...
I've committed to learning Esri's ArcGIS Pro. Problem is, I use a Apple MacBook as my primary GIS machine and most software from Esri only runs on Windows. Up to this point, this is no big deal because ArcMap is 32-bit and not very memory intensive. It's been running on Parallels for Mac just fine for 2 1/2 years. Things change.
I had played with the Beta a while ago, and it didn't run too well on my current system. The display flickered & stuttered quite a lot and seemed to be constantly loading something. In anticipation for full release of ArcGIS Pro v1.0, I upgraded to the most current version of Parallels (10) and doubled my RAM to 16GB. Unfortunately, these easy answers didn't help with the display, I was still getting jumpy navigation and 3D felt like it was on Windows 2000. Great. Felt like i just blew $200 in upgrades. :-/
Last week during the Esri Business Partner Conference I spoke to a few virtualization experts who were demonstrating ArcGIS Pro on a virtual machine. (it seemed like they were there waiting just for me!) We spoke about my set up, there was a bit of nose-wrinkling but I looked around and pointed out about a dozen or so Macs throughout the Expo center. You have to do this when you talk about Esri software running on a Mac. Do I even need top point out how Apple was the only PC maker to have double digit growth in the past year? Point is there will be a lot of people trying to figure out how to run ArcGIS Pro on their MacBooks and the folks at the conference helped me out so I pass along that info to you:
Don't use open source virtualization. Virtual Box is nice if you aren't doing anything serious but doesn't have the options or horsepower that a production machine requires. VM Ware Fusion and Parallels are virtually identical in benchmark testing with ArcGIS Pro.
Do upgrade your RAM. I moved from 8 to 16 and dedicate a full 8 GB to my virtual machine. Parallels allows me do shave off another 2GB to the Video Memory still leaving 6 GB to run the MacBook.
Do use DirectX9 instead of 10. I know this is counterintuitive but the virtualization experts told me that ArcGIS Pro uses DirectX11 by default if it's available then jumps down to DirectX9. There is some compatibility issue with DirectX10. Parallels has options for OpenGL, DirectX10 and DirectX9. My video stuttering problems STOPPED when I chose DirectX9.
Do change ArcGIS Pro Display Options. Go ahead and monkey with the settings a little. Make sure your 3D accelerator matches your VM host. Enable Vertical Synchronization, and test the Speed --|-- Quality slider. I also set my system to delete the cache after I close the project.
Do use a host machine with a Nvidia Graphics card. MacBooks with Retina displays usually have one of these but you can check to make sure. Unfortunately, I do not. Download the 'Clear Sailing' Nvidia demo to test your system.
Every system is a bit different. ArcGIS Pro is programmed to use a GPU if it's available. My Expert friends inform me that VMware Fusion leverages the GPU for 3D acceleration, but does not support GPU true pass-through. Parallels tries to create a virtual GPU by assigning RAM directly to 3D acceleration but it's not a direct GPU either. Look for this technology to keep advancing. I an a firm believer in SSD drives. I have two right now, one is completely for the Windows VM.
Geo-Professionals should really change that, because ArcPro, Pro, ArcGIS Pro, AGP whatever-we-call-it is actually a pretty good product. YES, it has some shortcomings, as most first versions do. However, in a very unofficial tally from a group of 12 GIS professionals, the good outweighed the bad 8-5. Not a blowout be any means, but a positive result nonetheless.
It's no surprise that we (Cloudpoint) are behind the product. Ok, I am. I recently doubled my RAM in may MacBook in-part to be able to devote more speed to Parallels to run ArcPro. It runs well too! Drawing does slightly stutter when in 3D but that doesn't matter because I have yet to be convinced that my clients want or need 3D GIS.
I digress. This morning I created the two videos below in order to demonstrate ArcGIS Pro and several of it's best qualities (not 3D). The videos are fast paced, packed full and I kept them between 6 & 7 minutes. This is not GIS training, you can't train any person GIS in 7 minutes, let alone on a new piece of software. I hope you enjoy them and then download your copy of Pro to try it out.
Please leave a comment on YouTube if you like it.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking you know anything about the future. Sure, There's lots of neat confucus-iy quotes about knowing the future from learning about the past, or whatever. I've succumbed to the temptation myself to guess what will happen in the next 5 years. Here's the real deal. You can only control the "now". Even then just a little tiny corner of your world. The future is ever changing, take a lesson from Yoda.
Here at Cloudpoint, we are developing Principals to work by and not procedures or policies. We have no employee handbook or workplace guidelines. Even if we did it would be filled with bullet-point list of adages. For Example:
Be Professional.
Work Hard & Be Nice To People.
Are you Productive or Just Being busy?
Make it Better.
Why are you here?
When the door is shut, don't bother me.
Never Stop asking Questions.
When you feel like you can (or try to) predict the future, your pride gets in the way of actually making it happen. Somewhere inside you become a spectator watching life rather than a participant in it: "I knew this was going to happen!" Not helpful. A bit of personal humility can go a long way when you are assisting people with a new technology. Rather, when you set attainable goals you set a standard for yourself, a personal guideline. American author Mark Batterson once said (paraphrased): 'Goals are Just Dreams with Timelines' Well Said, Everybody needs dreams.
This is what 2015 looks like for us. These are our genericized Goals:
Increase Benefits to Team Members
Expand our Territory
Hire
7+ Speaking Engagements
Learn New Software
Read 13+ Books
Freely Distribute Several Useful tools
Centralize Cloud Offerings
There are others that I'm not willing to share, but this is most of the list from our first 2015 staff meeting. Some of them are personal, some are corporate all are real and attainable.
Don't let the lure of trying to predict the future fill you with apathy and pride.
What are your goals?
