Please note that not all Geographic Data Viewer sites will have all the functions described herein.

You can measure distance on maps using the Measure Distance tool. Select the tool, click on the start location (A) and drag to the end location (B). As you move the cursor, you can see how far the pointer is from the start location in the Segment length box. The distance between the two points is given.

If you are interested in the length of a line with multiple stops, click and drag the first sement. Release the mouse button and without moving the mouse, click and drag the new segment. The length of the new segments will be added to the previous total. In this example, you can see that five stops were added. The total round trip distance is 2.678 miles.

To clear the measured totals or to end measuring, double-click on the map.

Select the Find button from the main toolbar. The dialogue box you see here will pop up.

Please note that the search is case sensitive, you may need to use the Identify tool to determine how the data is stored. Type in "THOMPSON" and select the layer or the layers you wish to search. In this case it is: java_tut.Park. Click the Find button and the results should appear in the window to the right. The computer searches the database and highlights the feature on the map. If more than one feature are found, click one to select it. You may also choose the Pan to or the Zoom to buttons at the bottom of the results and computer will move to the selected feature in the Map Window.

This feature only works for strings of information that include text. This means it will find "Nest" or "Nest2120", but not "2120". Remember it like this: if you can punch what you are searching for into a pocket calculator, the computer probably won't find it (but it never hurts to try).

Remember this tool! The Clear Selection tool clears/unselects any selected features, distance measurement lines, etc. This tool is the equivalent of a few good shakes of an etch-a-sketch. Unless you want to print a map with features selected (they usually appear shaded yellow) it is a good idea to hit this button before you create a print page.

In this example, you will select all the parks that have a perimeter less than 3150.945 meters. First, make the parks layer active. Open the query window with the Query button and select the Field 'PERIMETER' by double-clicking. Then click the less than sign from the available operators. Now you can either click a value from the list in the Values window or type a value for the expression. At this point you could add more criteria to our query string, but let's not get carried away. When the Execute button is clicked, the computer runs the expression and the results are displayed at the bottom of the Query Builder window and on the map. You can either show all attributes or select only one field to display in the results from the drop down menu.

At the bottom of the results, there are several options. Choose Highlight to highlight the selected feature(s) on the map. Pan and Zoom move to or zoom in to the selected feature(s). You can run simple statistics on your results by clicking the Statistics button. Choose a field from the statistics window and click OK. The statistics are then shown in a separate dialogue box. Finally, if you wish to save the results of your query, click the Save button and save it as a text file. In the save dialogue box type a name for the file and add a .txt extension.

To do this, you select the layer of interest and then pick how you want to select the features.

First, you can draw a selection rectangle using the Select by Rectangle tool. Every feature touched by the rectangle is        selected and is highlighted on your map.

The Select by Circle, Select by Line and Select by Polygon tools work in the same way.

To view the attributes of selected features press the Attributes button from the main toolbar and the Attribute                                                      Window will appear.

First, click on the Copy Map Image to File button.

The following window will be displayed at the bottom of your browser window.

Type a name for the image in the Title field. This title will be displayed at the top of the saved map image. Specify where you want to save the image in the Filepath field. In this example, the file will be stored in the c:/temp directory under the name mapImage_82303.jpg. When finished, press the Save button.

I'd like to learn how to view and create MapNotes.