Thanks for the reply Tom, happy to engage on this topic. I promise not to send any more responses after this one, since we both have work to do.
I am aware of that capability. However, this requires opening the properties of each element in a map separately. That is inefficient. The setting placement values in properties thing sounds like a solution in theory, but realistically, you have to go about opening a half dozen (probably more) different element properties and type in the required spacing. You'll type that in, then look at it and think, "nah, that's not it, needs to move a bit left, donnit, wat?", and then open the properties again and guess again. And maybe that's fine if you are only making a few maps, but I make hundreds of maps every year, with many elements in each map, and things need to be consistent and efficient.
The facility of simply placing guides quickly and accurately, so that many elements can be aligned to those guides, without "precision mousing" when making a map, resulting in consistent spacing (and those elements can then be grabbed and moved in unison to a new guide if needed) is far more efficient.
The problem right now is that we cannot place the guides themselves efficiently because of the lack of ability to set the increments of the ruler. So we have to very carefully mouse each guide into place, and the chances that one of the 10 or 15 guides I place is going to be off by a few hundredths of an inch hovers right around 80%. And since its a variable scale on the ruler depending on how zoomed in to the layout you are when placing the guides, you cannot get the same offset from an edge, or an element, unless you are careful to maintain the same zoom level, and even then, since the increments are tiny, you have to mouse very carefully - which takes time and increases the odds of a mistake.
Consistency in the spacing of elements and offsets results in less mental work for the reader. If they are seeing that the spacing between my layout edge and my legend are not the same as the space between the layout edge and the other elements, it introduces yet another variable for them to think about that has nothing to do with the content of the map. It means that my end product is less effective. So, to efficiently produce effective maps, we need a way to quickly, consistently, and without excessive clicking or precision mousing, place guides. If my guides are set to an increment of 1/16th of an inch, it requires very little hunching over and squinting to get my guide to land right where I want it. If they are set to 1/8 inch, its cake. When they are varying from 0.165 inches to 0.0538 inches or whatever, it gives me brain hemorrhoids.
I'd love to see this fixed. It was in ARCMap, and the loss has impacted my productivity.
All the best,
