It's often necessary to work with the Drawing Order view of the Table of Contents, while also working with tables. Tables in a map document should be listed at the bottom of the TOC regardless of which view is shown.
Standalone Tables are not treated with much respect in ArcGIS and many functions that should work on both a Feature Class and a Standalone Table only have options to perform the operation on a Feature Class. A good example is that copy/paste insertion of records only works on a Feature Cass, despite the fact that Standalone Table records would greatly benefit from this same functionality and this behavior is supported for Tables in databases like Access.
Over 75% of my time is spent accessing and manipulating data through Tableviews, whether I am using a Feature Class or a Standalone Table. Standalone Tables are vital to Linear Referencing and many other applications, but ESRI pays far too little attention to them in the Desktop application. That needs to change and this idea would be one step in the right direction.
I'm personally not too bothered about viewing tables in the draw order I'm happy to jump in/out of draw order/source view. A tweak that would be very helpful is to be able to move the tables just like when you drag a layer to a new position. If I have a dataframe that has many standalone tables in it then is becomes a pain to scroll to a table, why can't I just drag it to the top and work with it?
I hate having to go to Source view. There is a bug that make SDE layers do a complete database read when I view Source view. Thereafter it takes 5 minutes to refresh my map no matter what view I am in. I have to close the map and reopen it (in Display view) to get back performance. If I could see tables elsewhere and avoid this unnecessary data dump I would gladly never use Source view again.
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