This basic one-day Workshop is designed to teach essential GIS skills as indicated by a survey of 500 GIS professionals, as well as input from several thousand aspiring GIS practitioners. Staff from government agencies, non-profits and universities will find the workshop particularly relevant.
The workshop focuses on eleven of twenty essential GIS skills covered in The GIS20: Essentials Skills book. These include:
• How to create a basic reference map and effective layout. These types of maps are what you would see in an atlas, designed to simply show geographic boundaries such as city boundaries with perhaps a streets and water.
• How to download 2011 geography files (shapefiles) from the Census for any city, county or state. It's important to have the most current geographic files when creating maps. In this element we download the most current, free geographic files.
• How to prepare data to easily integrate with ArcGIS. Students will learn to download data from the 2010 Census and map that data. Data preparation is a large part of working with a GIS. Here, you'll learn how to prepare your own Excel spreadsheets to work well within ArcGIS.
• How to join data to a map and create a thematic map. A thematic map is a color coded map showing the distribution of your data across a geography such as Census tracts or zip codes. This is a very frequent task in GIS.
• How to geocode addresses. In this section you will learn to map addresses, creating a map with dots on it that represent each address.
• How to export maps to other mediums such as geo-enabled pdfs, the web and print.
• How to project shapefiles for your location.
• How to perform spatial queries ( attribute and location ).
Other Information
Instructor: Gina Clemmer, author of the book The GIS 20: Essential Skills published by ESRI Press.
Times: 9:00 am - 4:30 pm. Lunch is at noon for half an hour (provided onsite). Two ten minute breaks are scheduled around 10:30 am and 2:00 pm.
Setup: Each student works on a computer provided by New Urban Research. Students do not bring their own computers.
Food: A light breakfast and lunch are included with registration fee.
Fee: $595