Could someone pass this on to the ArcGIS Pro development team?
(Edit: I did not know that the map frame in the layout could be locked when I posted, but I have posted a more refined suggestion farther down in my third post.)
The way the selection box works in ArcGIS Pro is fundamentally flawed.
A selection box should select only those objects that fall entirely inside the box. In ArcGIS Pro the selection box selects anything it touches, including the map frame! In 9 years of using ArcGIS Pro I have never encountered an instance were this would be preferable over selecting only the object entirely inside the selection box. Moreover, once you have attempted to select a subset of objects in a layout and accidentally selected your map frame as well, holding down Shift or Ctrl and clicking on the map frame will NOT remove it from the selection list!!
Say, for instance, that you cannot get the automatically generated legend to do just what you want so you have converted it to a graphic and now you have adjusted the ten separate items that make up the legend to just the way you want them. It is time to group them so that your legend can be handled as a single object, only you can’t just pull a box selection in from beyond the map frame because the map frame will be added to the selection set too, and there is no way to remove it. So, you are left trying to add all ten objects to your selection by clicking on them one at a time and halfway through you go to select an element and suddenly all the elements you have already selected rotate to a random angle. You scream incoherently and begin pulling your hair out in exasperation as Sharron in the next cubical calls HR again.
You hit Undo to return your elements to the proper orientation and complete the delicate, tedious, and nerve-racking task of selecting each individual element without stretching or rotating them and finally group them together into a single object.
Now you want to centre all the items in your title block and without thinking you draw a selection box across from outside the page as you would in ArcMap, CorelDraw, or just about any mapping or desktop publishing software you have ever used but instead of only selecting the elements in the title block it also selects the map frame and there is no way to unselect it. You try to suppress your scream of frustration before Sharron lodges a formal complaint. Your eye starts to twitch and a vein on your forehead begins to pulse, but you hold it in.
Then you notice that a town that needs to be included for reference is just beyond the edge of the map frame, so you go to the Layout Tab, Activate Map Frame, and pan the map slightly to make sure the town shows up at the edge. Only, now, the 27 labels you added to the map don’t line up with the features they are supposed to reference. If you were using Arc Map you could simply draw a selection box across almost all of the map frame, being carful to exclude one edge of the frame so as not to select the frame itself, to select all labels on the map in order to move them to match the new map position, but you are not using Arc Map. You are using ArcGIS Pro, so you are left having to find and select all 27 labels individually and hope you don’t miss one as the minutes before your deadline tick away and you fight the impulse to tear your heir out, scratch your face off, and put your fist through the monitor screen while screaming at the top of your lungs. You know that if you don’t hold it together HR will come and they will find you once again in a fetal position, rocking back and forth in the corner crying uncontrollably.
I expect better from an application that is more than a decade old!
Here is another gem I experienced just yesterday. In a project with a lot of maps and layouts it is fairly common for the X icon to delete a map or layout to end up immediately adjacent to the very small target you have to hit to open the dropdown list for selecting a map or layout when there are too many to display them all in the bar across the top. If your aim is off by just a few pixels and instead of opening the dropdown you instead delete a layout you spent an hour or two working on, there is no pop-up to ask if you are sure and Undo will not bring your layout back. An hour or two of work can be irretrievably lost in a single click.
I have been using ArcGIS Pro for close to a decade and over the last several years I have compiled most of my maps in this software, but if I want to do something quickly or just check some data, I still use ArcMap because it is quicker and easier. Nothing is quick or easy in ArcGIS Pro. For the longest time I thought it was just because it was new and I was not used to the new approach, but I have been using Pro for nearly a decade and that explanation does not hold up anymore, particularly when ESRI is no longer supporting the superior mapping software that ArcGIS Pro replaces.
I don’t care how many bells and whistles you add to your mapping software, if the basic, foundational, most often used elements are inferior, or down-right rage inducing, the entire application is inferior.
FIX WHAT IS IMPORTANT!!!
