GIS Tips & Tricks
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Creating Survey123 forms in Survey123 Connect provides access to many options for supercharged forms that streamline the user experience and minimize data entry errors. Calculations for questions using pulldata() function and its various functionalities allow for pre-population of answers, incorporation of advanced logic, external data lookup and other techniques that are not available with standard XLSforms.
When compared to traditional campus and facility management through CAD layers and multiple spreadsheets, ArcGIS Indoors offers a much more streamlined approach. Managing indoor assets through ArcGIS Indoors allows for improved facility maintenance, building operations, and indoor analysis across an entire campus thanks to ESRI’s ArcGIS Indoors Information Model (AIIM).
Even as most record keeping systems have become digital, there are still some collections of data that are being maintained on paper. We’ve seen plenty of cemeteries with all or some of their records on paper. Paying a third party to convert these to digital can be very costly. Luckily, with readily available…
Workforce for ArcGIS is one of Esri's native GIS applications that allows you to take advantage of a streamlined work order management system that is built directly on top of your GIS platform. This tutorial provides a basic overview of the application both from the desktop browser as well as a mobile perspective. For more information on how your organization can integrate work order management with GIS
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.
Need to create line features in the field? Grab a tablet, the Collector App for ArcGIS supports point, lines and polygon creation and editing. Wait, but what about connectivity? If the lines are created on a touch screen device they are going to be as accurate as…well as drawing things with your finger, right? No worries. If you have ArcGIS for Desktop Standard, you have the Snap tool available to you, which will help you out. Once you’re done making your field additions, you can bring the data back into Desktop and run Snap to ensure coincidence of features. You could just consider it the most useful markup method ever. (!)
Ingredients
AGOL Organizational Acct
Editable Feature Service(s) accessible on AGOL
ArcGIS for desktop Standard
Mobile Device
Before & After The red line was created in the field with Collector on iPad. The blue line has been snapped to the poles layer using the gp tool:
Important:Ensure vertices are added at (or near) every coincidence location while creating line features, as you will need them later for this process.
Note: This method may be possible without Organizational Account/Collector but is very likely not near as fluid.
ArcGIS.com is a great online GIS tool. Earlier this year, Esri had to remove the Microsoft Bing basemaps that were previously available to users. All conspiracy theories aside, this was a huge blow to online data collection. The Bing imagery is crystal clear and while second to Google in overall coverage, In a few areas the quality is actually far superior. As well, Esri does not have a good imagery-plus-streetname basemap similar to Bing's hybrid map.
There is some attempt to explain all of this on Esri's online resource page, but it doesn't get into the "why". It's worthy to note here that you should keep your MXDs with Bing Maps already added. While you can no longer add Bing imagery to a new ArcMap document, You will be allowed to keep existing layers. Also, you will be able to use Bing Maps in the free ArcGIS Desktop Explorer, which leads me to thing it's a MS licensing issue and not a Us vs Them problem.
At at any rate. Bing Maps are great, and we all still want them on our maps. You can still do this by using a Microsoft Bing Maps Key. The video below explains how to do this in a short 4 minute tutorial.
