Latest Contributions by IainStuart

David,   Quite a fascinating topic and quite an interesting question to pose. It seems to me as an adult learner of GIS there isn’t a uniform entity called GIS. There are basic concepts such as projection, databases and so on that live at the core of GIS and maybe are easier to teach with traditional methods.   Then there are elements which can be considered “practice” which are things like how to symbolise, add colour …etc and there are elements which can be considered “best practice – adding and editing metadata is one of them. I think for the “practice” elements group discussion with the addition of the trainers experience works really well.   Finally there are the more specific things you want to do which are user dependant. I have no interest in crime distribution but I do want to know hill shading but I might be the only person in a class that has that interest. I have found for the user-dependent elements dealing with my specific interests the You-Tube approach works better than doing a course that might only touch briefly on the topic I am interested in.   I wonder if there is some way of scoping specific elements into courses where there is some interaction one to one with an instructor via the internet.   I will be interested to see how your ideas flow through the ESRI training packages. Cheers - Iain Stuart ... View more

Hi, I do this work flow quite regularly. Firstly make sure you have transferred the data ok. it is a SSF file. You should be able to see it in Pathfinder Office I then use the Export utility and configure it so it uses the SFF file and outputs as a ESRI gdb file which is what you should be using for ArcMap. I have had difficulty as Pathfinder dislikes complicated file names so I save it to my D drive and then copy the fields to where I want on the networks. Seems to work a treat. Iain  ... View more

Fundamentally if ESRI pushes everything to on-line/cloud platforms then there will be a problem for those of us whose clients absolutely do not want their data anywhere near on-line and cloud for data security reasons. ... View more

Thanks for your responses - I ended finding the location of the files in the folder for ArcGIS 10.3 and copying to the same folder for ArcGIS10.4 which seems to have worked. Iain ... View more

Dan, Yes that's some of the documentation but when you click on "help" for the Download and Symbolize OSM Data tool to see why it didn't work the help is decidedly unhelpful. My problem lies in downloading the osm data and why the tool doesn't work when using a perfectly respectable gdb.  The GitHub instructions say   "In the 'Target Feature Dataset', browse to the location of your default geodatabase, and then append the name of the new feature dataset that will be created when the model is run". So what I am not clear about is the "append the name of the new feature dataset" bit (Append, BTW, means adding something to the end of something).  I just added a name "OSM" in the hope that the program would create the relevant files inside the gdb. Cheers Iain ... View more

Thanks everyone. Half the time with these problems finding the correct the terminology is 75% of the problem. I suppose it would be too much to hope for a common vocabulary. The solution was simple and works so many thanks for the prompt responses. Iain ... View more

Well of course like most computer programs the term "Help" is somewhat debatable, however ESRI is better than most. Typically I google the question and then enter ESRI Help that way. You get all different versions of Help and it seems that the new version contains much of the old version of help just slightly reorganised and made to look "cool".  Iain ... View more

I have had the same problems with old maps playing with the Auto adjust is one solution as is turning everything off and shutting down and rebooting the computer along with having a coffee while waiting for everything to reboot. This seems to calm both ArcGIS and myself but it is frustrating. It does seem that sometimes after two points are registered the one being registered flys off to a different location. You can see this using Fit to Display so it seems that ArcGIS thinks it is in a different location. Iain ... View more

Well I tried it and it worked much more smoothly than these things usually go for me. Now I'll have to upgrade to 10.3 to get the extra toolsets and of course work on the symbology to get a nice colour scheme. Thanks - Iain ... View more