Fine-tuning Layout View

[DanielLunsford1]

I am working on a display drawing for a new subdivision using ArcMap 10. The layout view is looking pretty good, but I am trying to fine-tune it now and I have a few questions:

1) My polygon layer shows each proposed tract; however, to find out what each tract's acreage is, I have to measure it with the measure tool. Is there any way I can set ArcMap to automatically calculate and show the acreage of each tract in the Attribute table?

2) It would be really nice if I could label each tract AND the acreage; the only way I can think to do this is to either create a point file that has one label, or put them all in layout view using the Text tool. However, both options have their own inherent problems. Looking at the Properties => Labels tab of any given layer, it looks like there's no way to label two fields from the same layer. Is this correct?

3) Finally, how do you lock a layout view? What I would like to do is lock layout view to a given scale that will not change if I move/scroll/zoom in either layout or data view (kind of like locking a viewport in AutoCAD, for those who are familiar with that program).

Please help, and thanks!

[DonovanCameron]

You can do all of this in ArcGIS - here are some options:

1.) Make sure your subdiv. lines are converted to polygons (this tool requires the mighty arcinfo...) if they aren't already and I would recommend storing them as a feature class inside of a geodatabase. (This is because the [AREA] field is added and calculated automatically)

2.) You can now use a label expression to both label more than one field at once AND display the [AREA] in whatever units you desire:

example:

[FIELD1] & " - " & [FIELD2] & vbNewLine & Round ( ([Shape.area] * 0.0002471054), 2 ) & " acres"

...where [Shape.area] is in square metres and converted to Acres - rounded to the second decimal place

3.) As for freezing your dataframe, either apply a fixed scale to stop the zooming but this does not stop the panning.

The most effective way I have found is to position your dataframe where you like in the layout, then apply a bookmark to save the current extent, scale and geographic location of the active dataframe.

Bookmarks allow you to go back to where you once were and it retains the scale and position (centre of map). Extent will be determined by width and height of dataframe in the layout if it is set to a fixed scale and not to 'automatic'.