How to Find Help for the 3.x Viewer and ArcView
You're working along in the MassGIS Data Viewer in ArcView and suddenly you get "stuck". You have a problem, a question about how to do something. Where do you turn?
Fortunately, there are a number of resources. This list is put together for informational purposes...
- The MassGIS web page: http://www.mass.gov/mgis/viewer.htm
- The online help in ArcView
- Others you know
- The arcview-l list and archives
- The ESRI web site:http://www.esri.com
- Other ArcView-related web sites
- Books about GIS
- Online technical help
The MassGIS web page has a lot of resources. If you are looking for Viewer information there are FAQs (frequently asked questions) documents, other Viewer documentation, Lotus ScreenCam demonstration movies which demonstrate various ArcView and Data Viewer functions, and links to other helpful web sites. If you have questions about data check out the Datalayer Descriptions and the status maps for datalayers that are not yet complete statewide (orthos, 5K wetlands, zoning, etc).
The online help is actually not bad. It is the standard Microsoft structured help with the 3 tabs: Contents, Index, and Find. The Contents is like a table of contents in a book – categories and sub categories are laid out so that you can get the big picture on a top such as "layouts". Index will search the titles of help pages – so you could type in "layout" here. Find will search every word of every help page to match your query. If you're looking for something obscure, such as references to .bil files, this is a good place to go. For more common topics, however, you would receive a lot of hits.
Most other people you shared training with you probably know. Consider asking them whether they've run into the same problem you're having. If both of you use GIS for similar tasks, it's quite possible that you've run into the same roadblocks.
There is an ArcView mailing list. Here's the way it works: A person with a question sends the question in an email out to arcview-l@esri.com. This question goes out to hundreds of people around the world. Individuals answer back directly to the person who asked the question. When the person who asked the question feels that they have the answer they send another message back to arcview-l@esri.com to summarize the responses they received. You can sign up to receive all the emails at http://www.esri.com/usersupport/support/selfhelp/esri-l.html, or you search the archives of the emails for a particular topic at http://www.gfi-gis.de/en/services/avkb/. The archives are not extremely current – they lag about 3 months behind.
There are online tutorials for ArcView – some free and some relatively inexpensive at the Virtual Campus: http://campus.esri.com
There are discussion forums: http://nt1.esri.com/community/community.cfm
There are repositories of scripts and extensions at http://gis.esri.com/arcscripts/scripts.cfm
If you want some additional functionality
that basic ArcView doesn't provide, you can write an Avenue script or extension,
or use someone else's).
Here are some other resources:
http://www.odf.state.or.us/DIVISIONS/management/state_forests/XTools.asp - Xtools extension
http://www.onwordpress.com – Onward Press for GIS books
There are links to these in the Viewer On-line Help area of the MassGIS web site.
I'm sure there are other ArcView-related
sites out there. You might try using some of the various web search engines
such as http://www.google.com, http://www.lycos.com,
or http://www.altavista.digital.com.
You don't have to buy a book, but sometimes another source of info can be useful.
ESRI sells some books. There is also another source: http://www.onwordpress.com.
You've exhausted the previous resources, or you think the problem might be a bug in either the MassGIS Data Viewer or ArcView itself. Use this handy email form to contact MassGIS: http://www.state.ma.us/mgis/vwr_help.htm. We can forward your question to ESRI technical support and get back to you.
Last Updated 1/17/2003
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