Emulating design sheets w rectangle polygon?

[MikeBosko]

I have a large map depicting the design of a river restoration project.  I have a layout showing all the design elements along this 1 mile reach of stream. I'd like to break this down to detail different sheets comprised of smaller reaches of the full project extent. I've seen this displayed on CAD (probably) drawings from engineers.  The main layout will show all the rectangular boxes (numbered design sheets) along the reach that depict the different detailed layouts.  Then, each detailed layouts would show the map detailed to within each box.

I attached an example of what I've done - but it was super hard and tedious to put together.

The first layout shows the full project extent, divided up with rectangle polygons named SHEET 1, SHEET 2, etc.  Then I tediously created different layouts that encompass the Sheet extents shown by the rectangular polygons.

To do this, I created polygons on the map, adjusted them to fit into my desired layout view (hard to do), then it was simply duplicating the layout and moving the map into place with the rectangle polygon as my guide.

There must be a better way???  (see attached pdf)

[Eugene_Adkins]

You could create a map series (Map series—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation). Most likely, the easiest way to do this (if you don't use the data you already created) would be to create a single polygon with the desired dimensions, and then you could copy and paste the original polygon and add the necessary information in the attribute table for each copied polygon. Once you have this set of polygons created, you can base your maps series on it.

If you have a CAD file of the polygons you could create your data off it.

Hope that helps.

[MikeBosko]

Thanks, I've never used map series before - just looked, very intriguing - especially as I add to this project, building in new design sheets.  Cool.

The difficult part, though, was simply creating the polygons of the perfect dimensions and rotation to fit the view (layout map).  It took meticulous back and forth and way too much time to setup.  Hoping there's a better way.

[Eugene_Adkins]

Biggest time saver on that would be if you get access to the actual CAD data then you could import it and then either convert it to a polygon or create your own polygon over the top of the CAD data.