You're working along in the MassGIS Data Viewer in ArcView 3.x 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...

1.  The MassGIS Web page for the ArcView 3.x Data Viewer

The MassGIS Web site has many resources:

• The Viewer On-line Help page includes FAQs (frequently asked questions) documents, other Viewer documentation and more
• Lotus ScreenCam demonstration movies demonstrate various ArcView GIS and 3.x Data Viewer functions
• If you have questions about data check out the Datalayer Descriptions.

2.  The online help in ArcView

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.

3.  Others you know 

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.

4.  The arcview-l list and archives

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://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=listserve.listserve.

5.  The ESRI ArcView 3.x Web site

There are online tutorials for ArcView – some free and some relatively inexpensive at the Virtual Campus.
There are discussion forums: http://forums.esri.com/forums.asp?c=3
There are repositories of scripts and extensions and Patches and Service Packs
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).

6.  Other ArcView-related web sites

Here are some other resources:
XTools extension for ArcView 3.x
Search ESRI Press and online booksellers for GIS books
You also might try using some of the various web search engines.

7.  Online technical help

If you've exhausted the previous resources, or you think the problem might be a bug in either the MassGIS Data Viewer or ArcView GIS 3.x itself, use our online technical support form.

Also: NEARC – the Northeast Arc Users Conference takes place every year in a different northeastern state. There are opportunities to ask ESRI techs questions and find out how other organizations are using GIS. For more information visit the NEARC web site at http://www.northeastarc.org/.

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Last Updated 11/20/2008
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