It would be very helpful if ESRI would present a free webinar on the basic paradigm shifts between ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro. How many users are tearing their hair out because there experience with ArcMap tells them something should be done one way, but Pro is designed around a different approach that the user does not know about? ESRI usually focuses on the big flashy things, the new stuff, but it is the basic day to day stuff that causes the most pain when they don’t work as the user expects.
I am going to post a few examples of things I learned the hard way. Maybe others can post about the things they learned the hard way too, because I am sure that there are other aspects ArcGIS Pro where I am suffering because I don’t know I am doing it wrong, and it will also help to put together a top ten list for a potential webinar.
I was using ArcGIS Pro for 7 years before I learned that annotation has a separate save button. With ArcMap I had always used the option to save annotation in the map, so that shaped my idea of how annotation worked. In ArcGIS Pro all my carefully placed annotation was resetting to default positioning seemingly at random. I thought annotation in Pro was completely unstable. I am not sure why it did not disappear every time. I am thinking that maybe the pop-up asking if you want to save when closing the project might have also saved the annotation, although I know there were also times when I did not close a project until I had finished and either printed a map or saved a .jpg of the map, then came back six months later to update it and found I needed to do the annotation all over again.
I was using ArcGIS Pro for 9 years before I learned that I could lock the map frame in the layout. In ArcMap a selection box would only select the items fully inside the box, so if I wanted to select all the objects in a title block, I would just draw a selection box from outside the frame that only completely covered the objects I wanted to select. In ArcGIS Pro I was reduced to holding down shift and clicking on each item individually because a selection box would select the map frame as well. Locking the map frame makes it unselectable so I can use a selection box again.
What other very basic common tasks am I doing wrong in ArcGIS Pro and suffering for? What other paradigm shifts have I stumbled across and learned by accident that some other user is still tearing their hair out over? Post your own experiences so that I might learn from them and ESRI might consider putting together a Webinar for all the misguided souls out there.
