By Charlie Frye, Esri Chief Cartographer
Something we didn’t exactly predict when we originally designed Mapping Center was how useful you would find the Ask a Cartographer page. It wasn’t long before we realized that, in response to your questions, we were answering with lots of tips and tricks, ideas for workflows, and a some FAQs that we thought would be helpful to share.
The new Ask a Cartographer page allows us to share these with all of you. We’ve added a searchable archive of many of the hundreds of questions we’ve received along with our answers. Keep the questions coming; hearing what you do and helping you where we can is one of the more enjoyable aspects of our job.
There are a couple of things that you should know about the new Ask a Cartographer page. First, while nobody abused this idea, a few of you got efficient and asked several questions at a time. In the interests of keeping things manageable and sharing your questions and our answers with others, we ask that you try ask discrete questions so that each is a separate topic . This will make the search results for the archives easier and more accurate.
Second, we created the option for you to make your question private. This allows you to ask your question without worrying that your query and our answer to it will become public That said, well over ninety percent of the questions we have received to date were completely generic. For this reason, the default option is public. Further, we only publish your question, a title that you provide, and our answer — nothing more. If we’re not sure, we’ll keep your question and our answer private; only you, based on your global Esri login will be able to see it. Note that if you search using your name as a Keyword, you will be able to find all the questions you have asked us.
While we have your attention, the representations survey is going well! We’ve already received some valuable feedback (thank you to everyone who has responded so far)! If you haven’t had a chance, please take a few minutes to complete the survey. Sometime soon, we’ll be ready to share some of the results.
Thanks,
The Mapping Center Team
