Tuesday, August 08, 2006

ArcGIS 9.2 Improvements @ ESRI-UC

The James Fee Blog provides a great summary of various ArcGIS 9.2 improvements displayed at the ESRI User Conference.

My take on the improvements (Italics from James' blog, mine are plain text) - Why shouldn't some of the improvments have happened long ago (my comments are tongue-and-cheek of course).
  • Better mouse roller wheel support - How long has the wheel (er, mouse) been around?
  • Customize Map Scale list (1"” to 200'’, etc) - If it's not on the engineer's scale, what's the point
  • Copy and paste right out of identify window - Copy/Paste out of a window, great idea!
  • Right click and calculate areas or length - But there have been ArcScripts to do this for years.
  • New graph support (Much easier to make 'Excel Quality'” graphs from inside ArcMap) - what will I do with my copy of Harvard Graphics?
  • Native support of Excel (add Excel spreadsheets can be added right to the layers list of ArcMap) - nobody uses Excel, I need native Quatro Pro support, besides I keep my mail lists in Word.
Others are new & nifty features that I took note of (really):
  • Flicker capability (rapidly turn layers on and off to toggle back and forth between datasets) - This has a lot of potential as long as it's not the 'temporal' function ESRI's been hyping. No really, this could be nifty.
  • Export to PDF now includes named layers (layers tab in Acrobat can now turn on and off the layers right inside the PDF - Just a very nifty feature. I think it could be extremely useful in the real world