Creating a MapStep-by-step

Francisco Olivera, Ph.D., P.E.Department of Civil Engineering

Texas A&M University

View

Open ArcView from the Start button

To create a View document, in the Project window, select the Views icon and click on New.

To add Themes to the View document, click on the Add Theme button and navigate to the folder \\esri\esridata\usa, select Feature Data Source from the data source type options, and select the cities.shp, rivers.shp, roads.shp and states.shp datasets.

To display the themes, check their visibility box.

Maximize the View window.

View

View

To modify the View properties, click on the View/Properties menu.

Overwrite the name of the View to “United States”.

Set the Map Units to the units of the data displayed in the View, which are Decimal Degrees.

Set the Distance Units to kilometers.

Change the Background Color to blue.

View

Theme

To modify the States.shp properties, make the Theme active and then click on the Theme/Properties menu.

Overwrite the name of the Theme to “US States” (note that the data source does not change).

Define the Theme as the conterminous United States.

Label the Theme with the state name.

In the View window, Zoom to the conterminous Unites States.

Theme

Table

Modify the properties of the Cities.shp Theme, by calling it “US Cities”, defining it as the cities with population greater than 1’000,000 people, and labeling it with the city names.

Open the US Cities Theme table by making the Theme active and clicking the Open Theme Table button

To modify the Attributes of US Cities, make the Theme active and click on the Table/Properties menu.

Click on the Visible column and leave a check only in the following fields: City_name, State_name, Pop1990 and Married.

Write “City”, “State” and “Population” under the Alias column for fields City_name, State_name and Pop1990, respectively.

Table

Chart

To create a Chart document, in the Project window, select the Chart icon and click on New. The Chart Properties window opens.

Select Attributes of Cities.shp (note the Theme name change has not affected the Table name) as the Table with the information needed for the chart.

Add the fields Population and Married by selecting them and clicking on the Add button.

With the chart window active, click on the XY Scattered Chart Gallery button and select the first option.

Charting capabilities in ArcView are less powerful than those in MSExcel.

Chart

Layout

To create a Layout document, in the Project window, select the Layout icon and click on New. A Layout window opens.

Click on the View Frame tool and draw a box in the layout page the size of the map you want to include. Select the United States View.

Click on the Table Frame tool and draw a box in the layout page the size of the table you want to include. Select the Attributes of Cities.shp Table.

Click on the Chart Frame tool and draw a box in the layout page the size of the chart you want to include. Select the Chart1 Chart.

Click on the North Arrow and Scale Bar Frame tools to add a North arrow and a scale bar to the Layout.

Click on Text tool to add a Title to the Layout page.

Layout

Project File

A project file can be used in a different folder of the same computer if all references to data use absolute paths, which is the default option of ArcView.

A project file can be used in a different computer, if and only if both computers have identical folder structures, which is very unlikely. If a project is copied to a different computer, most likely ArcView will not find the data.

To share a project file, it has to be copied -- with the digital spatial data, tabular data, and extensions -- to the second computer, and “repathed” (i.e., all absolute paths have to be changed to relative paths).

Paths are found in the project text file by searching for the word “path”. Not all “repath” processes are identical, and they should be made carefully and only after having saved an original of the file as backup.