Portable ArcMap Arc10
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20 Creating an Arc Map project (*.mxd) document that can travel. (Portable ArcMap Document) 2011 Maria Fernandez, Charlie Schweik Note: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ . Sometimes you need to move your GIS project to other computer, save it to some media and use it somewhere else, or share it with other people at your enterprise or company. The Arc Map document contains links to all the data sets present in the document, as well as information to display such data sets. Such links are preserved in the form of “paths” to the data, that you can see when you click “source” tab in the table of contents. If at any time you change the location of some of the data layers, the map document is going to be pointing to a wrong location and the data won’t be able to be displayed: When this occurs, you can fix individually each link right clicking the data set, going to properties, source, and “SET DATA SOURCE”, browsing to the new location of the data set.
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Creating an Arc Map project (*.mxd) document that can travel.(Portable ArcMap Document)
Transcript of Portable ArcMap Arc10
20
Creating an Arc Map project (*.mxd) document that can travel. (Portable ArcMap Document)
2011 Maria Fernandez, Charlie Schweik
Note: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.
Sometimes you need to move your GIS project to other computer, save it to some media and use it somewhere else, or share it with other people at your enterprise or company. The Arc Map document contains links to all the data sets present in the document, as well as information to display such data sets. Such links are preserved in the form of “paths” to the data, that you can see when you click “source” tab in the table of contents. If at any time you change the location of some of the data layers, the map document is going to be pointing to a wrong location and the data won’t be able to be displayed:
When this occurs, you can fix individually each link right clicking the data set, going to properties, source, and “SET DATA SOURCE”, browsing to the new location of the data set.
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That’s how you fix the links if the need arises, but there are several ways to minimize those broken links. One is “don’t mess” with your data sets, moving them between folders… if you need to move a data set, just copy it and paste it in other location, leaving a copy wherever Arc Map wants to find it. But this is the most general way in which you can move a whole project successfully to other computer: when you create the Arc Map document, or at any time, you can make those links to the data “flexible” or portable, so when you open your Arc Map document somewhere else, Arc Map can find the data and display in the table of contents. In ArcMap – Go to FILE > MAP DOCUMENT PROPERTIES > Click “Store relative path names to data sources”. DONE! As long as you move the folder with the data layers and the *.mxd Arc Map document all together, you can put it in any location in other computers.
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Do some experiments saving arc map projects using this option, and saving them to a CD and opening them in other computers. You can also practice this principle just moving the folder to other location in your computer. REMEMBER: *.mxd project does not carry the DATA!!! Only the paths or links to the data. You need to save and move the data layers together with your Arc Map project.
