If you've not been following along on the GIS Education Community blog be sure to check out George Dailey's series covering National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer. The 10-part post was inspired by the PBS special The National Parks: America's Best Idea and not only provides a great tour of parks, but also demonstrates how the unique capabilities of ArcGIS Explorer can be leveraged to do some really interesting things. Part 10 was recently published, and here's a handy reference to all of the posts.

• Part 10 Conclusion
• Part 9 Redwood National Park
• Part 8 Acadia National Park
• Part 7 Great Sand Dunes
• Part 6 Arches National Park
• Part 5 Grand Canyon National Park
• Part 4 Crater Lake National Park
• Part 3 Saguaro National Park
• Part 2
• Part 1

Mapping corn mazes using ArcGIS Explorer is one of the latest posts found on the GIS Education Community Blog. Written by ESRI education manager Joseph Kerski, the post covers adding data by importing text files to create an Explorer map showing the spatial distribution of corn mazes throughout the US, and then looking at the relationship of where corn is grown to where mazes are located. Cool!

It's easy to add a title or text to your ArcGIS Explorer presentation, just use the following controls on the Presentation tab that let you add and remove text, and change colors and styles.

Here we've chosen from one of the built-in styles to add a title.

Now that's a pretty good title, but using image overlays (one of the types of content you can add to Explorer) you can really spiff things up. In this example we'll use PowerPoint and Photoshop, but you can substitute whatever you prefer and you can accomplish the same using a variety of alternatives.

First using PowerPoint, create the text you want to display using WordArt and other text effects.

When you're happy with the result, copy and paste it into Photoshop, making sure the background is transparent.

Next, use the magic wand

to select the white areas, making sure to select the "holes" in the letters (like in the A, p, o, and e). Then delete the selection, leaving a transparent background under the letters.

Save the file as a PNG and then add it as an image overlay using Add Content.

And now you've got some cool text you can position and use in your next Explorer presentation.

We thought we'd take a closer look at a couple of add-ins you can find on the ArcGIS Explorer Labs group (authored by Explorer team member Michael Waltuch). Both are useful for locating businesses and more, and placing them on your map.

We've added both, and both work similarly; they search within a 10-mile radius from the center of your map. How do you know where your map center is? If you use Find the map will automatically be centered on the match. So, for example, below we've entered "Philadelphia, PA" and the map is automatically centered on the match location. To zoom out or in while keeping the center, just use your J and L keys or the navigator zoom slider.

A way to show the map center is to toggle the target indicator. Do this by clicking the ArcGIS Explorer button

then choosing ArcGIS Explorer Options

then choose the Map Window category and you'll find the Show target indicator option under the Position Information heading.

Now in the center of your map you'll see the target indicator - "+"

First we'll take a look at the Bing add-in.

We've searched for  "cheese steak." The matches appear, and we've clicked one to get more information, including a link to the business Web site.

To move any of these to your map as a note, just select, right click, and choose move to map.

Here's the Yahoo! add-in

And we've done the same search.

The information includes a link to the business Web site and ratings and reviews.

At the recent European User Conference, hosted by ESRI's distributor in Lithuania HNIT-Baltic, ArcGIS Explorer was featured during the opening plenary. Here's a few highlights from the demonstration.

ArcGIS Explorer was introduced as a way to provide broader access to GIS data and to reach out to new users. The demonstration began with some highlights of the conference venues, using notes to add photos and more to the Explorer map, here using the Bing maps hybrid.

Added to the basemap gallery, from which the Bing hybrid was chosen, were additional basemaps showing EUC attendees and basemap topos and orthophotos for Lithuania.

Here's the basemap of Lithuania, chosen from the basemap gallery shown above.

One of the defining characteristics of ArcGIS Explorer is its ability to work directly with GIS data, including layer packages, making it ideal for sharing the results of GIS analysis. Here's an example using a layer package authored in ArcGIS Desktop showing traffic noise levels throughout the city of Kaunas.

Several custom add-ins were demonstrated, including one which performed a drive-time analysis. Below is and example showing three minute drivetimes and restaurants near the conference location in Vilnius.

Presentations were also highlighted, and the featured ArcGIS Explorer presentation was one about UNESCO World Heritiage sites in Lithuania. Here a PowerPoint slide has been incorporated into the Explorer presentation as an image overlay, one of the many Add Content types supported.

Here's an image overlay that's unique, showing the cockpit of plane. Using this overlay and the dynamic navigation offered by an Explorer presentation, the audience was flown (virtually) over the Curonian Spit.

Because ArcGIS Explorer presentations make use of whatever data you have in your map, including enterprise data, real-time information, and rich media content like photos and videos, you can use these during a presentation. Here protected areas along the Curonian Spit are show, and when clicked show the attributes in the popups. Also integrated are panaromas of various areas along the spit.

Finally the presentation wrapped up with a virtual tour of the historic heart of Vilnius, one of the largest surviving medieval towns in northern Europe. Here's the view from the top of Gediminas Hill, an excellent place from where the panorama of the historic town center can be admired.

It was another great Explorer demonstration and presentation, and a great way to introduce attendees to the conference and the unique history of the host city.

Halloween is just around the corner, and we couldn't resist highlighting a couple of.. well... bewitching examples.

First, on the Google Earth blog there was a post about a pumpkin KML. We downloaded the KML, added it to Explorer, and gave it a little extra twist by switching to our World Physical basemap and using Swipe on the pumpkin KML to reveal a slice of it.

And then we switched to 2D mode for a different look.

And here's another post on the GIS Education Community blog by Angela Lee that takes on a Halloween theme by displaying a layer package shared on ArcGIS Online to show a thematic map of US pumpkin production.

The ArcGIS Explorer online system check utility has been updated to include Windows 7, and is a handy tool to check to see how your system meets minimum and recommended system requirements.

Visit the ArcGIS Explorer download page and look for the system requirements link.

The link will bring you to the detailed system requirements information, which includes a link to run the online system check utility.

Run the utility and you'll get a full report on your system.

The latest issue of ArcWatch, ESRI's e-magazine for GIS news, views, and insights, publishes an article by ArcGIS Explorer product manager Bern Szukalski with information on getting started, providing tips and pointing out some great resources. Even seasoned Explorer users will find the resources useful.

The other day we posted about how you can find and use ArcGIS Explorer add-ins from ArcGIS Explorer Labs. Last night the weather was bit crazy in Redlands with high winds. And on the news this morning were reports about a big storm hitting Denver. So we decided we'd take a closer look at one of the add-in in Labs - the Weather Forecast add-in which uses weather services from Weather4Webs.com and a placefinder service from geonames.org. This unsupported sample was built by Dara Burlo, one of the ArcGIS Explorer product engineers.

First, as described in the earlier post, go to the Labs group and grab the Weather Forecast add-in. After you add it you'll see something like this on your add-ins tab:

Click the add-in, and you'll see a dialog open. Use the button to click on the map.

Under the hood the coordinate location is obtained via the mouse click, and using the geonames API the nearest city is found. You'll see the city name displayed (above we clicked in Redlands, CA).

Then choose from 1 to 7 day forecasts (the default is a 5 day forecast) and click Find Forecast. The city name is passed to weather4webs, which returns the desired forecast for the location you pointed to.

Add-ins are used to extend ArcGIS Explorer's capabilities and can be created using Visual Studio and the ArcGIS Explorer SDK. The ArcGIS Explorer team has published a variety of ready-to-use add-ins that you can download from ArcGIS Explorer Labs, one of our ArcGIS Online Groups. Let's take a closer look at how you can use add-ins from the Labs group.

First, navigate to the ArcGIS Explorer Labs group - there's a number of ways to do this. One way is to go to the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center and click the Data tab, then look for the Labs group.

Another way is to go directly to ArcGIS Online and search for the ArcGIS Explorer groups, where you'll find the Labs group among them.

However you find it, the Labs group has lots of add-ins that you can choose from and begin using. Some are experiments, some represent functionality that will eventually find its way into the core product. All are unsupported. If you're a developer, you'll find the source code for some of these on the ArcGIS Explorer Gallery on the Resource Center.

When you find an interesting add-in, just click the name to learn more about it. When you find one you want to try, click Open in ArcGIS.

When prompted you can either open the add-in right away, or save the add-in (delivered as a file with a .EAZ extension) locally.

If you choose Open, ArcGIS Explorer will restart and you'll see the add-in you selected on a new Add-In tab on the ribbon.  If you choose Save, then you can browse to the .EAZ file by choosing Manage add-ins in the Resources section of the ArcGIS Explorer Options.

Whichever route you take you'll see a new Add-Ins tab with your chosen add-in(s). Here we've added the Wikipedia add-in.

Experiment with what you find on Labs, we'll be covering a few in detail here in future posts. If you want to learn more about add-ins you can review the Add Functionality Help topic.

With the recent release of Windows 7 we've had a bunch of questions regarding ArcGIS Explorer running on it. The ArcGIS Explorer system requirements published at the ESRI Support Center Wiki has been updated with Windows 7 support information.

On September 14, 2009, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar launched the Department of the Interior’s strategy to address current and future impacts of climate change on America’s land, water, ocean, fish, wildlife, and cultural resources. During the launch the Department of the Interior used an ArcGIS Explorer presentation to show increases in surface temperatures around the world.

The entire presentation can be viewed in its entirety online at the DOI climate change site.

Recently we had a question from an educator preparing a geography lesson for his students. He had collected the names and birthplaces of his students and wanted show them on a map and share them with his class using Explorer. "Was that possible?" he asked. "Sure, easy" we answered. So we thought we'd share how.

First, the name of each student with their birthplace was added to a text file, like what you see below. Note that the first line of the file contains the field names, and the information is separated by commas.

Next we clicked add content, and chose text files from the list.

After browsing for the file, Add Text File guided us through the process of adding the locations to our map. On the first page we didn't have to change anything, since we already had a comma delimited text file with the first line containing the field names - the defaults. At the bottom we could see a preview of the file, so we could ensure we had made the right choices.

On the next page we chose the option to specify that the file contained address. Though we didn't have a complete street address in this case, we did have the city and state.  We chose the Name field from the file as the title, and the City field as the description. The title is both the hover text and the title of the popup, the description is what appears in the popup window.

Next we chose the addres fields. Because we had named them city and state Explorer automatically them.

When finished we could see the locations of all the students on our map with each name as the hover text and popup title, and the city displayed in the popup window itself.

But here's a cool thing we can do with the description. Since the description is displayed in the popup window, if we change the text description to a URL, then rather than display text we'll display a Web page in the popup. So we edited our original file, adding a new field we named Web Site and added the URL to the home page for each student's home city.

We saved the text file, then added it again. Because we had already added the file, Explorer asked if we wanted to use the same choices as before. Because we added some new information and wanted to change things, we chose No.

Now in the Add Text File preview, we could see the new Web Site field and the URLs we'd just added.

This time through we chose the Web Site field as our description.

And when finished, we could click on any student's location to view the Web site of their home city.

For more information about working with text files, see the add text files Help topic.

In a recent post we covered the basics of some of the things you can do in note popups. Popups are also displayed when you click on features. One of the questions we got just after our post was - can I have more than one popup open at a time? And the answer is yes, and here's how.

When you open a popup you may have noticed the pushpin in the upper right corner. Here we've hovered over it to reveal the context help.

Just click the pushpin to pin the popup open. As you open other popups you can either let them close automatically when you click and open a new one, or pin them to keep them open. Here we've opened several popups and pinned them.

Popups are an easy way to add lots of different content to your map, and are found with notes as well as views. Here we'll cover the basics of popups, and how you can display text, photos, Web sites, and more.

First, we'll start with a very basic example. Here we've added a note, and typed a string into the popup (in popup edit mode).

Now when we show the popup, the results are pretty obvious and exactly as you'd expect.

Now let's spruce things up a bit and add some inline HTML to add some bold and italic text.

And here's how the popup looks now. A nice little improvement.

Want to show a photo in the popup? It's easy. Just enter the path to the photo.

And here's the photo displayed in the poup.

But remember that local paths are not accessible to others if you want to share your note or map. You could put the photo on a common location that's accessible to others within your company, but a Web location that anybody can access might be a better approach. Here's the same photo, but now it's been published from the ESRI Web site. Instead of a pathname we're using the URL to display the photo in the popup. Since the URL is public, everyone will see the same popup contents if we share our note or map.

And here's how it looks. It's a large photo, and one taken of the new ESRI HQ building here on campus.

Likewise we can enter a URL if we want to open a Web site in the popup. Here we've entered the URL to the ESRI home page.

And here's the Web page opened in the popup.

Now, let's put all these together. When you enter a string in the popup ArcGIS Explorer does its best to figure out what to do with it. If just text, it will display the text. If a path or URL, it will display the target. But to create a popup that includes a little bit of everything, we'll need to use a little HTML.

Here's the HTML to display both formatted and non-formatted text strings (like in our first two examples above), a picture from a local source (the third example), and links to a Web site and photo on the Web (the last two examples).

Here's how our popup looks now:

Doing interesting things in popups is easy. Just experiment with a little HTML.

For more information see the HTML markup for notes Help topic.