Using ArcMap for the first time can be very difficult. Not knowing where certain buttons, or tools, are can be stressful because you'll spend half an hour trying to find a button that you are only going to use for a split second. Also, if ArcMaps is updated and the tutorial is not, things would have been slightly different and making it difficult to figure out.
After going through four hours of four exercises, the fifth exercise is a bit easier because by then you've mostly have a sense for where all the tools are and how to find them. ArcMap can become easy with practice, but at first is not.
GIS is nice because you can create maps that project the same topic with different areas of focus. In other words, you can look at one thing from different areas and perspectives. By being able to add graphs to the maps, it can help understand the statistics that your map is representing. Also, by being able to add color to the maps, it can help to get a better visual representation of what you are trying to explain.
The bad thing about ArcMaps or GIS is that they are constantly trying to be improved but the tutorials are not. I feel that if you are going to update these tools then you also have to update the tutorials so that users do not get confused. Also there are tools that are repetitive and I feel that they should just be one general tool bar and then have the extra fancy buttons on other tool bars. For example, there are different zoom buttons on a lot of the tool bars and I think they should minimize the amount of these so that there are only about two or three: a layout view zoom button and a data view zoom button, and maybe a fixed zoom button.
No comments:
Post a Comment