Advice on switching from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro?

Question

I feel like I am really late on this, but I have used ArcMap for years but my work wants everyone to switch to ArcGIS Pro ASAP. I have tried using it but I am really struggling to get to a point of being able to use it well enough to apply anything I have learned to do in ArcMap. What are the best places to find help/tutorials/documentation to get started? The type of things I have gotten stuck on were things that should be simple like adding a north arrow to a map, the only documentation I could find was for a different version and after two hours of trying to figure it out I gave up and did it in ArcMap instead.

SaraJL · Answer

I would definitely recommend the training modules/sites people have listed above!

For what it's worth - if you typically make a lot of paper maps (versus online maps), Pro can be really clunky. The Layout view is really not as user friendly as ArcMap. If you're making a map and publishing it to either Online or a Server, it can be a lot easier to manage.

The real benefit I've gotten from switching to Pro from ArcMap is that Pro does not crash for me like ArcMap did (the fabled "ArcMap has stopped working for some reason" error message that ends the whole application). We also don't have nearly as many lag issues with ArcGIS Pro using basemaps as we did with ArcMap. In ArcMap, the basemaps were pretty much unusable.

I struggled quite a bit when first switching (I had been using ArcMap since 2006) - but it does get a lot easier! I still have to Google things occasionally to figured out where something is located, but the program does all the same things as ArcMap for the most part. I also like the Catalog pane setup a lot better.

Good luck!

BarryNorthey · Answer

There is a large button called Learning Resources on the ArcGIS Pro startup page. It is also available from the Project tab – Learning Resources tab on the lower left if a Project is open.  There is always a Help button ? in the top right that opens a Pro keyword search with version selection on the left. Any Internet search engine should return useful results; be sure to phrase the search something like ArcGIS Pro add north arrow. YouTubers have been busy as well and much more.

JamiDennis · Answer

Esri has a bunch of courses online you can take: https://www.esri.com/training/

Honestly, I took the Cartography MOOC to learn ArcGIS Pro and that got me started - then I just had to jump in and do it. The hardest part, of course, is knowing where to find everything. Generally, if you can do it in ArcMap, you can do it in Pro, so try doing as many projects as you can in Pro so you get experience and begin to learn the layout of Pro. I still find myself pulling up the Esri documentation to figure out how to do a certain task now and then, but that happens less and less these days.

So, bottom line - sometimes you just have to jump into the deep end and start swimming! 🙂