Most efficient way to produce repetitive US thematic maps w/ Alaska and Hawaii

[HunterHurst]

I am trying to convince my organization to buy ArcGIS based on a 60-day trial.  I have a license at home for 9.2, but I'd like to have 10.2 at work because of the excel conversion tool. I also think they need to get out Excel 2003 Mapland plug in.  They do repetitive simple US state boundary and US county boundary maps that need to include Hawaii and Alaska as insets to portray juvenile population, arrest, custody trends etc.  I setup a basemap using dataframes to let them position Hawaii and Alaska where they want and callout DC but it creates a problem where the joining of data has to occur multiple times.  I also don't want to have to have the production person create a separate layer from the join and add it to each frame. Since a state or county boundary file is the only data layer, it would be great for a single joint to sort of cascade across those AK, HI and DC data frames in the map template.  I attached an example of the layout view for the template I developed.  

The non-technical folks I am working with don't understand why I have to apply the frames and repetitive joins.  They don't understand why my basemap cannot be in a single frame in the layout view.

[JimCousins]

If you store your data in a database (Personal or File Geodatabase), you can do the join there, one time, and have all of your data frames point to the same joined file in the database. Update the database, open your map, and all of the information refreshes without you doing anything further.
Regards,
Jim

[HunterHurst]

Thank you for pointing me in the correct direction.  I could get out a couple of guidebooks I used in grad school, read the working with Geodatabases chapters and get started knowing I was going in the correct path.  It seems like In need to understand creating feature datasets as well to setup the simple personal geodatabase. At least initially all of the map production will occur one workstation.

[TimWitt]

I would also download a trial version of ArcGIS 10.2 at work, because it is completely different from ArcGIS 9.2

[HunterHurst]

Thank you, 10.2 on a trial is what i am using at work to try to convince the decision makers to buy it to produce their state and county boundary thematic maps in a more flexible manner than is possible with the Mapland plug in to Excel they have been using for years.  Having it at work will also open doors for me to use it for many other projects.

[TimWitt]

Hunter,

tell them depending what ArcGIS product they buy, you might also be able to get a free ArcGIS Online organization account which includes ESRI maps for Office.

[HunterHurst]

I was able to create a geodatabase and bring in the state boundaries and a sample table of data, but I'm not sure where I do the joining of the data that impacts all the data frames. Does that occur in the Catalog or in the Table of Contents? So far it seems like I have to repeat the join if I work from the Table of Contents and I'm not clear on how I would navigate in the Catalog to join the state boundaries feature with the table of population change.  Can you please point me in the right direction? And thank you for advising me.

[MelanieSummers]

Hi Hunter,

Joins are saved to the layer, not the data so you would not be able to set this property through the Catalog window unless you have saved the data as a layer file in which case you would be bringing in the same layer multiple times.

Best,
Melanie S.

[HunterHurst]

Hi Melanie,

Reading my guides it occurred to me that this might be where I need to go. I get confused about the difference between adding a .shp (I'm only really dealing with one of state boundaries) and a .lyr file but will read up.  Thank you for helping me.

Hunter