All activities within Arcview are organized with a Project, which may consist of a number of Views, Tables, Charts, Layouts and Scripts (Scripts are programs in ArcView's Avenue language and this exercise does not include user-defined scripts). The functions of Arcview include: displaying coverages in a view, viewing the related attribute tables of this view, relating attribute tables with a key item, plotting charts to display spatial information, and creating layouts of the view and related tables and charts.
When ArcView is first executed, a new untitled Project window is opened. This window includes several icons marked Views, Tables, Charts, Layouts, and Scripts. This is the main Project window, which allows you to create new Views, Charts, etc., or to open existing ones that you have already created in that project.
Help! If you are lost and don't know how to do something, ArcView has
on-line help which is accessed by hitting the 
symbol in the display window.
button on the top tool bar. Select
Feature Data Sources in the Data Source Type slot (it might be
already selected). Go to your local workspace directory either by typing the
directory name into the pathname box or double-clicking on the directory with
the mouse. Highlight the two coverages shown: Texas.shp and
Evap.shp (hold the Shift key while selecting the second coverage),
and click on OK to add them to your View. They will each show up as a bar
in the legend portion of the View window with the name of the shapefile shown on
it. For the View you are working with, the shapefiles Evap.shp and
Texas.shp are called Themes. Click on the raised box to the left
of the Theme names Texas.shp and Evap.shp to make a check mark and
see the coverages displayed in the View window. Drag the legend bar for the
polygon coverage (Texas) below that for the point coverage (Evap) to show points
on top of polygons. Dragging a theme is accomplished by clicking beside the
theme symbol, holding down the mouse and dragging the box that appears.
Once you've got your Project set up, you can save it to a file by making the Project window active and choosing the menu option File/Save Project. A Project file has the extension .apr and contains information about the structure of your project, including the pathnames to the data dislayed in it. The Project file is an ASCII file that can be viewed with a text editor if you are curious about what it looks like. It is wise to periodically save the Project as you carry out this exercise so that you can recover all your work in the event that you crash Arcview before completing the exercise.
paint brush in the top right corner of the Color Palette which
appears. Select Apply in the Legend Editor to get the new color. Close
the Color Palette and Legend Editor boxes using the icon in their upper left
corner.
You can zoom in or zoom out from a portion of the View window using 
or 
. To zoom to the extent of active Themes,
use the 
tool in the
upper row of the tool bar. A Theme is active if its legend bar in the View
window appears raised. Click on the Theme's legend bar to make it active.
By clicking the 
icon
in the View tool bar and then clicking on a map feature in the View, you can
find out information about any feature in the active Theme (a display of its
record in the data table). If you click on a feature and don't see the correct
record displayed, check to see that the correct theme is highlighted in the View
window legend bar.
in the top row of buttons to open the
Table.
Notice how there is a one to one correspondence between a record in the data
table and a geographic feature in the map. This table-map linkage is one of the
key things that makes a GIS operate effectively. To make sure that the row
you've selected is easy to see, promote to the top of the table using
the 
icon. By holding
down the shift key you can highlight several features at once.
tool, and then
clicking on the features in the view. Again, by holding down the shift key, you
can add features to the set you've previously selected. You can also drag a box
over a region on the screen and select all the features in that region. If you
attempt to select features graphically and don't succeed, check that you've
clicked on the theme name in the legend bar so that it is highlighted.
By clicking on the 
icon you can unselect all records. By holding down the shift key and
clicking on a selected record, it will be unselected.
The data that you are examining are summary statistics of pan evaporation records at various sites in Texas. The attributes of the data, shown in column in the data table, include the name of the station, the city it is located nearest, the datum (elevation above mean sea level of the station in feet), the beginning and ending month and year of records, the latitude and longitude of the station in decimal degrees, and the values of the monthly and annual pan evaporation at this site in inches per month or per year, respectively. You'll see that there are missing values at some stations. The stations at Hidalgo in South Texas, and Lubbock in North Texas make an interesting comparison of evaporation conditions in the State.
button before calculating the statistics.
Again, multiple fields can be selected by holding down the shift key. Once this is done, click on the box labeled Add. After clicking OK, a Chart will be plotted. You can change the form of the Chart using items in the top tool bar. The horizontal axis of the Chart is automatically labeled using the field names you selected for plotting. If these are too long to fit on the chart, you can make shorter aliases for these field names by making the Table active, selecting the menu item Table / Properties, and entering text into the column labeled Alias. For example, you can replace the label Jan_val with Jan, etc.
To Edit Features of the Chart, select the Chart Edit tool 
and then click on the feature you wish to
Edit. You can change the nomenclature of the legend and the chart title and
location in this way.
icon in the Project window. To work with
a Layout, it is useful to enlarge the Layout window (by dragging on the window
corner(s) with the mouse). After enlarging the window, click on the Zoom to
page 
tool to maximize use of the window space. As illustrated in the image below, by
clicking and holding the left mouse button on the furthest icon to the right on
the lower tool bar, you can add a number of different objects to the Layout.
From top to bottom, the objects that you can add are a View, a Legend, a Scale,
a North Arrow, a Chart, a Table, or a Graphic. After selecting one of these
items, you can draw a box on the Layout to specify the location and size of the
selected object.
Begin by selecting a view 
and drawing a box to accomodate it. When you've drawn the box, a
dialog box will come up asking you to select the view to show in the box. Select
View1, and you should see your view of Texas show up. You can add another
object template to the layout using the right hand side tool in the lowest row
of the upper tool bar. Select the chart object 
to add a chart. To connect the chart
visually to the corresponding point in the view use the draw tool 
which is selected from the list of
icons under the 
button.
When drawing the line you'll find that it automatically snaps the end points of
the line to the grid points shown in the Layout window. To stop that happening,
click off Snap to Grid in the Layout/Properties window.
You can add text to a Layout using the 
button. You can also draw points, lines,
and polygons using . If
you find that the lines you are drawing are not in quite the right locations,
use Layout/Properties and click off the "Snap to Grid" box. To change the
size of the text you've added, highlight the text and use Window/Show Symbol
Palette and the text icon to alter the text size. Text size of 14 point is
the default. Usually 24 or 36 point looks good in layouts. Similarly, to change
the line thickness use the same pallete and select the Line icon. Line thickness
of 1 is the default.
