Data Driven Pages- Grouping features

[dylancummings]

I am trying to create a map book in ArcGIS 10 using the Data Driven Pages tool but I am having some trouble. I have the state (Florida) broken up into seven different regions and I want to make it so that each page in the map book displays 1 of the 7 regions. I can't figure out how create pages based on certain features though. I know you can create a grid and overlay that on top of the state but then it just creates a page for every single grid square. Is there a way where I can combine all the grids that make up Region 1 or can you tell each page to display certain counties or certain features? I just need 7 pages with each page focusing on 1 of the 7 regions? Can you guys help me with this?

[JoshWhite]

The pages are based on the index layer that is selected in the Set Up Data Driven Pages dialog.  You could easily have pages that cover an area as small as a Census block or as large as a continent.  I often choose quarter sections for the city but I've also attempted other shapes as well.  What you want to focus on though is the Extent tab.  If the polygons are all different sizes then Best Fit is your best bet or if you have specific scale in mind you can create a field in the index layer that tells DD what scale to draw each page.

[dylancummings]

Well i have a shapefile for the state of florida and in the attributes table I created a column which basically designates every county to a specific region (e.g. Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, etc, etc, all get a 1 and then Leon, Wakulla, etc etc get a 2 and so on and so forth) but when in the Index Layer portion of the DDP setup I set my layer to my shapefile of Florida and then for Name Field and Sort Field i specify the column in the attributes table that specifies what region each county belongs too...it just gives me 67 pages (67 counties in Florida) and it shows me county by county all of the counties in Region 1....then all the counties in Region 2...but i don't need to see each individual county in the region i need to see the whole region as one page so that away i should only have 7 pages with one region per page. How do i get that???

[TrishRice · Accepted solution]

DDP's cycle through all the features in the index layer.  So if you only want 7 pages, you want 7 features.  Run the Dissolve tool on your counties based on the region.  You will then have 7 polygons.  Set that up as your index layer for DDP.