Week 4 - 3 Projections of the State of Florida

The map below showing Florida at three different map projections was created for the Week 4 Projections lab assignment for the University of West Florida Online GIS Certification class, Intro to Geographic Systems (GIS4043/L).

The lab demonstrated how to make changes to datasets in ArcGIS. The different map projections were generated using the ArcGIS ArcToolbox, Projections and Transformations toolset, specifically the Project Tool to create new datasets from the original Albers projection.

Generating the three maps was fairly straight-forward but setting them in layout caused some issues with the county labels and the scale. Often, when converting county labels to annotations, the scale of the map would change and had to be changed back so that all three maps matched. Additionally, setting the font proved challenging because the font would look smaller on one map then on the others even though the projections were the same. Under refresh and print preview, all would look okay so I listened to the lab instruction not to panic and things worked out.

One of the themes of the map was to show comparative areas of the four counties per projection. Inserting a table, in this case an Excel table, so the numbers could be compared next to each other seemed the best way to display such information. Creating the table required selecting - Insert => Object - locating Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet from the list, creating it as new and creating the table. Once I saved, a neat table formatted per the Excel could be sized and positioned in the map. Definitely a useful technique as an object can be added from scads of other programs as well.