Lab Exercise 2: Windows XP Basics & ArcGIS 9.3 in Geog 250 - Prof. William S. White | Lab Reports Geography

GEOG 250: Introduction to Computer Mapping and GIS

Lab Exercise #2: Windows XP Basics and Working with Geographic Data using ArcGIS 9.3

Main Objectives:

1. To investigate the file management features using the Windows XP operating system.

2. To get acquainted with the ArcGIS 9.3 software. In this part of the exercise, you will view maps in ArcCatalog, prepare

several data sets for viewing and symbolizing in ArcMap, and ultimately print your final map.

Note: For this lab exercise, information on Windows XP was taken from the Windows XP online Help Viewer (Start

menu>>Help and Support). General information on files, folders, and drives was obtained from the Help Viewer and the

Whatis.com web site (http://whatis.techtarget.com). Images of ArcGIS software are from ESRI, Inc. (http://www.esri.com).

I. Some Windows File and Folder Management Basics

Much of this tutorial will be hands on, using the procedures discussed in the lab. These procedures will describe certain

methods of file and folder management. You may have another way of managing your files on a computer, and that’s fine, as

long as you logically manage your files and folders.

File management is crucial to successful GIS work, so please do it!

A. Understanding files, folders, and drives

A file is a unit of data available to users of a particular computer operating system. Files are available to the

operating system and to the software program that is designed to work with the file. Proper file naming is very

important in Windows. Files residing in the same folder or drive must be uniquely named. Files usually contain

a 3-letter extension after the file name that helps the user identify the file and the program that is used to open it.

A folder is a named collection of files. This collection can be retrieved, moved, renamed, and manipulated as one

single entity. Folders usually do not have a 3-letter extension after the folder name. Both folders and files can be

named using many different text and number characters; however, I recommend that you keep your naming simple,

avoid too many characters, and get into the habit of using an underscore character instead of a space in names.

Some GIS functions do not like spaces in folder and file names, so do not use spaces – use an underscore ( _ )

character instead in the name.

A drive is an area of data storage (for files and/or folders) on the computer. Formatted drives are differentiated

from one another by assigning a drive letter. Some of these drive letters have become standard on PCs, such as

the C: drive (hard disk drive). The A: drive (floppy) is becoming obsolete and is hard to find on modern computers,

while the second floppy dive (B:) drive hasn’t been in computers for many years. On most new Fort Lewis College

lab computers, the letter D: is assigned to the DVD-RW drive. If you use a flash drive, it will be assigned to the E:

drive. Your 2 GB of personal shares on the FLC network reside on the M: drive. The O: drive is a network

directory that contains files stored by professors for their students. The G: drive is another network directory that

contains files stored by FLC’s IT Department for computer users. GIS data from ESRI, Inc. are stored in the

G:\ArcGIS folder.

B. File management basics and Windows Explorer

Proper file management is the key to successful and happy computing! Placing files in folders helps you

remember the meaning of file names at a later date. It’s all about organization, and the more organized you are

when using a computer, the more productive you will be in the long run.

The Windows Explorer program (a.k.a. the Windows File Manager) is commonly used to view the hierarchical

structure of files, folders, and drives on your PC. Using Windows Explorer, you can copy, move, rename, and

search for files and folders. You can also use Windows Explorer to connect to (and disconnect from) networked

drives. There are many other operations available through the pull-down menus of Windows Explorer.

Windows XP will let you create file/folder names that have spaces in them, and that are longer than the

traditional 8.3 file naming convention (eight characters, a dot, followed by a three character extension). As

indicated above, in GIS work it is still a very good idea to not put spaces in file/folder names.

Partial preview of the text

Download Lab Exercise 2: Windows XP Basics & ArcGIS 9.3 in Geog 250 - Prof. William S. White and more Lab Reports Geography in PDF only on Docsity!

GEOG 250: Introduction to Computer Mapping and GIS

Lab Exercise #2: Windows XP Basics and Working with Geographic Data using ArcGIS 9.

Main Objectives:

1. To investigate the file management features using the Windows XP operating system.

2. To get acquainted with the ArcGIS 9.3 software. In this part of the exercise, you will view maps in ArcCatalog, prepare

several data sets for viewing and symbolizing in ArcMap, and ultimately print your final map.

Note: For this lab exercise, information on Windows XP was taken from the Windows XP online Help Viewer ( Start menu>>Help and Support ). General information on files, folders, and drives was obtained from the Help Viewer and the Whatis.com web site ( http://whatis.techtarget.com ). Images of ArcGIS software are from ESRI, Inc. ( http://www.esri.com ).

I. Some Windows File and Folder Management Basics Much of this tutorial will be hands on, using the procedures discussed in the lab. These procedures will describe certain methods of file and folder management. You may have another way of managing your files on a computer, and that’s fine, as long as you logically manage your files and folders. File management is crucial to successful GIS work, so please do it!

A. Understanding files, folders, and drives A file is a unit of data available to users of a particular computer operating system. Files are available to the operating system and to the software program that is designed to work with the file. Proper file naming is very important in Windows. Files residing in the same folder or drive must be uniquely named. Files usually contain a 3-letter extension after the file name that helps the user identify the file and the program that is used to open it. A folder is a named collection of files. This collection can be retrieved, moved, renamed, and manipulated as one single entity. Folders usually do not have a 3-letter extension after the folder name. Both folders and files can be named using many different text and number characters; however, I recommend that you keep your naming simple, avoid too many characters, and get into the habit of using an underscore character instead of a space in names. Some GIS functions do not like spaces in folder and file names, so do not use spaces – use an underscore ( _ ) character instead in the name. A drive is an area of data storage (for files and/or folders) on the computer. Formatted drives are differentiated from one another by assigning a drive letter. Some of these drive letters have become standard on PCs, such as the C: drive (hard disk drive). The A: drive (floppy) is becoming obsolete and is hard to find on modern computers, while the second floppy dive ( B: ) drive hasn’t been in computers for many years. On most new Fort Lewis College lab computers, the letter D: is assigned to the DVD-RW drive. If you use a flash drive, it will be assigned to the E: drive. Your 2 GB of personal shares on the FLC network reside on the M: drive. The O: drive is a network directory that contains files stored by professors for their students. The G: drive is another network directory that contains files stored by FLC’s IT Department for computer users. GIS data from ESRI, Inc. are stored in the G:\ArcGIS folder.

B. File management basics and Windows Explorer Proper file management is the key to successful and happy computing! Placing files in folders helps you remember the meaning of file names at a later date. It’s all about organization, and the more organized you are when using a computer, the more productive you will be in the long run. The Windows Explorer program (a.k.a. the Windows File Manager) is commonly used to view the hierarchical structure of files, folders, and drives on your PC. Using Windows Explorer, you can copy, move, rename, and search for files and folders. You can also use Windows Explorer to connect to (and disconnect from) networked drives. There are many other operations available through the pull-down menus of Windows Explorer. Windows XP will let you create file/folder names that have spaces in them, and that are longer than the traditional 8.3 file naming convention (eight characters, a dot, followed by a three character extension). As indicated above, in GIS work it is still a very good idea to not put spaces in file/folder names.

II. Exercise 1: Using Windows Explorer

Using Internet Explorer (click on the Internet Explorer icon to the right of the Windows Start button), go to the GEOG 250 course web site at http://faculty.fortlewis.edu/white_s/classes/geog250.html. Use the left mouse button and click on the Lab Assignments link, followed by the data for lab2 link underneath Lab 2: Windows Basics and Introduction to ArcGIS 9..
A File Download dialog box will pop up next. Click on the Open button. The file you have just opened is known as a zip file, zip archive, or zip folder, or in Microsoft Windows terminology, a Compressed (Zipped) Folder. To avoid further confusion, I will refer to these items as “zip files” in the future. In Windows XP, zip files have a unique icon – a small folder with a tiny zipper. The zip file contains compressed versions of other computer files that can be easily transported from one PC to another, or through a network. The shareware program WinZip ( http://www.winzip.com ) can be used to create and extract zip files. WinZip also supports other compressed file archive formats, such as tar and gzip. With Windows XP, you can create new zip files and extract the contents of existing zip files to other locations on your computer.
After opening the zip file, you should now see a window with the file name at the top. Notice that the zip file contains six compressed files: five “countries” files, and one Word document (.doc file). Without selecting any of the files, go to the File menu and choose Extract All.
In the “Extraction Wizard” dialog box, click on the Next button.
In the second window, you need to select a destination for the extracted files. Click on the Browse button.
In the “Select a destination” dialog box, open up My Computer , followed by your M: drive. The M: drive is open when you see a small minus sign “-“ to the left of the drive icon. Click on the OK button. Back in the Extraction Wizard, click on the Next button.
Click on the Finish button to close the Extraction Wizard and display a listing of your extracted files.
You should now be looking at the contents of your M: drive. Go to the View pull-down menu, and choose Explorer Bar>>Folders. You are now looking at the Windows Explorer view of your M: drive. Windows Explorer can also be found from the Windows Start Menu>>Programs>>Accessories>>Windows Explorer , or by right-clicking on the Windows Start menu and choosing Explore. Browse the M : drive, and examine the contents of this drive. In addition to any other files/folders that you may have saved at one time on your M: drive, you should see the six newly acquired files. In Windows Explorer, drives available on your desktop computer are listed on the left side of the window and the contents of selected drives/folders are listed on the right side of the window. Click on the View menu in Windows Explorer. There are five viewing choices in Windows Explore – by default, the Details view is used, and this is the one that I recommend you use when working on these computers. With the Details view on, you can easily see the size of all of your files, the file types, and when they were created. With the M: drive open, and the contents displayed on the right side of Windows Explorer, go to File >>New Folder. Create a new folder called geog250. Do not use spaces in “geog250”. Use the left mouse button to select the six extracted files. To select all of the files, you can either drag a box around the files by holding down on the left mouse button, or you can point and click on each file. To select multiple files, hold down the Shift or the Ctrl key on the keyboard while you are pointing and clicking. When all six files are selected, carefully hold down the left mouse button, point on a selected file, and drag the group of selected files into the new geog250 folder. Release the mouse button to move them into the folder. Open up the geog250 folder in Windows Explorer. You should see the six extracted files inside of this folder. Inside of the geog250 folder, create 11 new folders, and name them lab2 through lab12. Create a 12th^ folder called final_map. Do not use any spaces in these folder names! Since you’ve already done lab 1, there’s no need to create a folder for it. Move the six files that you just extracted into the lab2 folder. Open up the lab2 folder and examine its contents. Create two additional copies of the readme.doc file – use the right mouse button, click on readme.doc , and choose Copy. Then right click in the blank portion of Windows Explorer (within the open geog250/lab folder), beneath the listing of the six files, and choose Paste. Right click and choose Paste again to get another copy.

There is one row of tool icons (sometimes two rows) beneath the seven pull-down menus ( File , Edit , View , …). The first fifteen tool icons (left to right, up to and “tool tip” help box will appear that names the tool, and more detailed information about each tool appears in the bottom left corner of screen. The next set of tool icons, the Geography Tools, consists of six tools that allow you to work specifically with the map data. Use the Zoom In tool, and zoom into Central America and the Caribbean. You can either point and click with the tool, or drag a zoom box. Coastal detail increases, but interior detail is lacking in this map.
Keeping with the same map extent as above, single click and select other map data listed in the Catalog Tree. Notice that some of the layer files ( .lyr ) contain special symbology and labels, and that the SDC files do not. The layer files reference the SDC files for the geography, and the SDC files’ attribute tables for the symbology and labels.
Single click on the cntry06.sdc file to select it, and then click on the Metadata tab. Metadata is very detailed text-based information for your map data. The metadata for cntry06.sdc shows that the file contains world country boundaries as of the year 2006. Click on the Spatial tab, and you can see information about the data’s geographic coordinate system. Click on the Attributes tab, and you’ll find details concerning the data’s text and/or numeric characteristics (attributes). Metadata can be written using tools built into ArcCatalog. We will revisit metadata later in the semester.
In ArcCatalog, click on the Launch ArcMap tool icon. This will start the ArcMap program. You can also start ArcMap by choosing Start menu>>Geosciences>>GIS>>ArcGIS Desktop 9.3>>ArcMap – this is the way you’ll open it most of the time.
In the small ArcMap dialog box, choose to start using ArcMap with a new empty map. Leave the other choices alone, and click OK.
Click on the Add Data button. In the Add Data dialog box, click on the small down-pointing triangle to the right of the “Look in:” box. Notice that the G:\ArcGIS folder is already available, and that you can view a listing of all of the data in that folder. That’s because you already connected to the folder in ArcCatalog; there’s no need to use the Connect to Folder tool to reconnect. In the listing, click on G:\ArcGIS and navigate through the Data and Maps folders, world , and data folders. Single left click on the cntry06.sdc file to select it, and then hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard, and select the world30.sdc file. You are getting ready to add two files at once. Click on the Add button.
You are now viewing world country boundary data in ArcMap, the ArcGIS program that you use to explore and edit geographic data, perform spatial analyses, and create professional-quality maps. The ArcMap interface consists of the Table of Contents and the map display area, as well as a number of toolbars and menus for working with the map and its data. The order of layers within the Table of Contents is important; the layers at the top of the Table of Contents draw on top of the layers below them. Therefore, you should put the layers that form the background of your map at the bottom of the Table of Contents. In ArcMap, there are two views for working with data: Data View and Layout View. In the Data View, you explore, edit, query, analyze, and symbolize data. In the Layout View, you arrange map data frames and add other map elements, such as scale bars, titles, and legends, to create a map layout that can be printed or exported to a graphics file format (i.e., JPEG, TIFF, etc.). In the Data View, you can view only one data frame at a time, while in the Layout View, you can view multiple data frames. When you work in ArcMap, your work is saved as a map document file (.mxd extension). The ArcMap user interface should look like Figure 2 on p. 7.
Another way to get data into ArcMap is by dragging and dropping data sets from ArcCatalog to ArcMap. Return to ArcCatalog and single click on the cities.sdc file. Hold down the left mouse button, and drag the file on top of the ArcMap task shown in the Windows task bar along the bottom of your computer screen. ArcMap will become active and full-screen. Keep holding the left mouse button, and drop the cities.sdc file just below the word Layers on the left side of ArcMap. You should now be looking at a map of world countries and cities showing international boundaries (as polygons) and large cities (as points). You can now close ArcCatalog ( File>>Exit ).
Back in ArcMap, dock the floating Tools toolbar horizontally to the right of the button with the Question Mark icon.
Save the map in ArcMap by clicking on the Save tool icon. You can also save your map work by going to File>>Save , or you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+s ( Ctrl and s keys hit simultaneously). In the Save As dialog box, navigate to your M:\geog250\lab2 folder. Save the map as Gulf_of_Mexico.mxd – use the underscore character; do NOT use a space in the file name.

The three map layers displayed in the Table of Contents listing should be in the following order: cities [top], cntry06 [middle], world30 [bottom] If they are not in this order, use the left mouse button, and drag a layer to the proper location in the Table of Contents.
You turn layers on/off in ArcMap by removing the checkmark from the Table of Contents. Turn off the cities layer, then turn it back on. To remove a layer from the Table of Contents and the map data frame, simply right click on the map layer name and choose Remove. However, don’t remove any of the layers.
In the Table of Contents, single click on the little colored box beneath the cntry06 layer. In the Symbol Selector dialog box, change the Fill Color to Arctic White (notice that the color name appears when you hover your mouse cursor above a color box), change the Outline Color to Black, and change the Outline Width to 1. Click OK to close the Symbol Selector dialog box. Change the world30 layer symbol to a blue square (single click on the Blue box in the first row of colors, between Green and Sun). Ensure that the outline width of 0. Click OK.
Double click on the word cntry06 in the Table of Contents. In the Layer Properties dialog box, click on the General tab. Change the Layer Name to countries. Click OK. Also, change the name of the world30 layer to oceans. The cities layer name is OK.
Use the Zoom In tool, drag a rectangle, and zoom into Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean as shown below. Your map scale should about 1:25,000,000. The current map scale is displayed to the right of the Add Data tool. You can also type the scale in the box, hit the Enter key on the keyboard, and your map will zoom in or out to that exact scale. Make sure the Yucatan Peninsula is centered within the map frame – the Pan tool will help you do this.
Save your map by clicking on the Save tool.
Go to the Selection pull-down menu, and choose Set Selectable Layers. Remove the check marks from cities and oceans , and click Close.
Click on the Select Features tool , and single left click on the United States. The country border will turn light blue indicating it is a selected feature. Hold the Shift key down on the keyboard, and carefully select the countries in South America that you are currently viewing. Make sure you do not select Panama as it’s a Central American country. Once these countries are selected, right click on the countries layer in the Table of Contents and choose Selection , followed by Create Layer from Selected Features. A new layer called countries selection will appear in the Table of Contents.
Change the color of the countries selection data to a Gray 20% fill color and a Gray 50% outline.

Drag the zoom box from northwestern Mexico to northern Guyana as shown in the map to the left.

Figure 1. The ArcCatalog user interface.

Figure 2. The ArcMap user interface.

Lab Exercise 2: Windows XP Basics & ArcGIS 9.3 in Geog 250 - Prof. William S. White, Lab Reports of Geography

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Partial preview of the text

Download Lab Exercise 2: Windows XP Basics & ArcGIS 9.3 in Geog 250 - Prof. William S. White and more Lab Reports Geography in PDF only on Docsity!

GEOG 250: Introduction to Computer Mapping and GIS

Lab Exercise #2: Windows XP Basics and Working with Geographic Data using ArcGIS 9.

1. To investigate the file management features using the Windows XP operating system.

2. To get acquainted with the ArcGIS 9.3 software. In this part of the exercise, you will view maps in ArcCatalog, prepare