My Own Map Week 2 GIS

This week we had to make our own map. Admittedly, I ended up doing the bulk of the work at the last minute. It was finals time in China and I was sitting my desk grading a huge stack of English lit finals. That being said, I really enjoyed this. I feel like I got a better understanding of how ArcGIS works. In the past I had done those ESRI lessons, but this week I got into more of the minutiae and I only look forward to more.

See my map below. I seem to have forgotten the borders! :( So now it's a nebulous map that floats in space.

I now feel I can better use the tools given, including the clipping. It's a mighty powerful tool I never knew existed. Learning how to inlay a smaller map was quite useful, though you can't see the work unless you're in layout view.

The most important for this week was learning how to source the metadata and the other related information (ctrl+f came in handy) inside the arc program. I realize the importance of this as it can have serious implications in future work.

I know in the future our labs won't have such a step by step feel, though I feel for now that was needed, as ArcGIS seems to be a large program where hand holding (initially) helps a lot.

It took me a solid 3 hours to go through the lab and to build the map. However, despite my thinking that I was being careful, I feel like the final product could've came out better. I had a hard time aligning all the elements. Is there a way to lock the elements as a total, so I can align them together instead each individual part? Was that already covered and I didn't pay attention? Questions for the discussion board.