Community
and Regional Planning Program
The University of
Texas at Austin School of Architecture
This tutorial shows you how to use the ArcMap module to create a simple map. ArcMap is one of the modules in ArcGIS Desktop. You use ArcMap to create maps, query data, perform analysis, and most of the other basic GIS operations. ArcMap is the module that you will use most frequently.
This tutorial only shows the most basic functioning of ArcMap. For further information about ArcMap, go to Help-ArcGIS Desktop Help - Contents tab - ArcMap.
You can use this tutorial with any GIS data files that are in formats readable by ArcGIS (e.g., shape files). Students in the Plans and Plan-Making course should use data for the southeast Austin. These are stored on each Sutton Lab PC in the folder path: C:\GIS_data\. In the folder for "GIS Data" there are several folders with data from different agencies - see Sutton Lab GIS Data Description for a description and online access to most of the data sets. For other data sets for our region, see GIS Data Sets Available for Download.
About storing saved files from this tutorial or other work for your classes. The "map" files you will be saving in this tutorial and in most of your GIS work are very small files with pointers to the data sets on the C: folder path. As you work, you can save a map files to the My Documents folder under a folder of your name while you are working on the computer. But you should always copy the map file(s) or any other files you save to your own media (CD, zip disk, webspace) when you are done. There is no guarantee that the files will still be there later. Also, if you have them stored on your own media, you can then continue working on another computer at any time. Finally, it would be very helpful if you deleted files on My Documents after copying to your own media. Unless you are editing the GIS data sets (which you will not be doing in this tutorial), there is no need to copy them.
You are now ready to proceed to the rest of the tutorial: