geobug

At my day job, I work with field scientists who work in some pretty remote places, and one of the things I'm frequently asked to do is to put a UTM grid on maps they'll take out with them into the field. Adding any kind of measured grid to your map document is a breeze in ArcMap. And if you're using data driven pages (DDP) and your pages are all the same scale (or nearly so) then you needn't take any further steps to accomplish your goal.

Here's a couple of fun things for Friday.

There is a handful of local GIS events coming up around here, if you happen to find yourself in the Sacramento area.

If you happen to be in the Davis/Sacramento area of California, there's a hackathon coming up that might interest you.

Recently I found myself sitting at a GeoDev meetup, having a beer with some fellow geeks and waiting for the lightening talks to start up. My co-worker, a recent hire who brought some additional and very welcome javascript and web app dev experience to our team, was sitting next to me. She leaned in at one point, watching folks mingle around us. "Why are they all guys?" she asked.

Welcome to the dev community.

Here's how this goes:

"What do you do?"
"Oh, I'm a geographer."
"Oh. My brother collects rocks."
"?"

[geobug takes a quiet breath and tries again.]

"You might be thinking of a geologist. A geographer studies the shape of the earth. Not rocks so much. Except the one big one."
"?"
"I make maps."
"Oh! Maps are cool. What kind of maps do you make?"
"I work for an archaeology firm."
"Ah. How many dinosaurs have you found?"
"!?!"

I did a presentation this week at my local GIS user group meeting. It was on customization options for Data Driven Pages in ArcGIS; I'm sure you're shocked at my choice of topic.

I had some power point malfunctions, which were kind of unfortunate (why does it never go smooth?) but we worked through it. The audience was pretty supportive despite the totally lack of the demonstration videos that I had so carefully put together, and I made it through. Folks asked good questions.

This is a bit of an extension on our last conversation regarding exporting data driven pages (DDP), but there's enough to talk about here that I thought it warranted its own post. Let's address how you go about manipulating layout elements with respect to your DDP setup.

Here's a use case scenario. Remember our map book of brewery locations? We were using data driven scale in that example, and that means the scale bar is going to change from page to page. Let's suppose we want some control over the scale bar settings on each page.

A successful map book is all fine and good, but, generally speaking, you're going to have to get it out of ArcMap and release it into the wild if it's going to be of much use to anyone.  So, in continuing our discussion on data driven pages (DDP), let's talk about printing and exporting.