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.

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.

When last we met, I gave you an example of an mxd set up with data driven pages (DDP) using a point feature class as our index layer. In today's article, I'm going to convince you of why you should never do that.

A good index layer, that is a polygon feature class designed to represent your data driven page extents and nothing more, will make you life easier. Period.

This is Part I of a series on the Data-Driven Pages (DDP) feature in the ArcGIS desktop software suite. Simply put, DDP allows you to make a series of maps from a single mxd file. The functionality was introduced at ArcMap 10, but, to my mind, remains one of the unsung heroes of the software suite.