Saving favorites for Business Analyst data items now available in Pro 2.8

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Hi! I’m Chris, a QA Lead on the Business Analyst Pro team. As a BA user, you have thousands of data variables available to you—which makes easily accessing your “favorite” variables all the more important. At the ArcGIS Pro 2.8 release (May 2021), you can now set favorites to quickly access your most commonly used data variables. This improvement is supported in any tool that accesses the Data Browser, such as Enrich Layer or Color Coded Maps. Favorites work with both local and online data.

Let’s walk through an example by working with the Enrich Layer tool…

In ArcGIS Pro, open the Analysis tab and click Tools. The Geoprocessing pane opens, showing the available toolboxes.
Open the Business Analyst Tools toolbox and expand the Analysis toolset. Open the Enrich Layer geoprocessing tool and click the plus button (+) next to Variables. The Data Browser opens.
In the Data Browser, double-click Population, then double-click Common Population Variables, and hover your cursor over 2020 Total Population. A star icon appears next to the variable name.
Click the star. It turns gold, indicating that this variable has been placed in your Favorites list.
Follow the same process to add more favorites.
In the Data Browser, click Favorites to display the variables you just marked with gold stars.
That’s it! You can now go straight to Favorites to select any of these data items the next time you want to use them.

NOTES:

A different Favorites list is created for each data source.
Favorites are global, so you can access them in new projects as long as the same Business Analyst data source that the list was created for is currently selected.

TIP:

You can backup or share Favorites by copying them from/to this location. This image shows the default path where favorites are created and some examples (C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Esri\ArcGISPro\Business Analyst\Data Browser\)…

Happy favoriting,
Chris

ArcGIS Business Analyst Pro Team