Pitfall and potentials of
ArcGIS
My
experience of the ArcGIS map software system was a love hate relationship. The
potential of this technology is astounding. The ability to quickly update and
modify the maps was one of the greatest advantages of this technology. The potential of the maps and what they
were able to do with data as well as the ability to change from layer to layer
easily was by far one of the most beneficial aspects of this technology. I think that the potentials of this
technology are endless. I love the
fact that you can use it for anything and that you can create hundreds of maps
based off the idea of how noise will effect the populations around an
airport. Overall I was impressed on
what the technology could do and was amazed on how it can create maps out of data
like the one we were using. However, being a first time user, I felt it was
very frustrating and difficult to figure out how to use the software.
Overall from my brief experience with the technology
I cannot find many other positive aspects of the software other than what we
already discussed in class. Personally
I felt it was very difficult to like the software. However, I can see how it
may be easier to use once you understand the software. Overall I am actually excited to learn
more about the software and actually learn how to create maps on my own without
having step-by-step instructions. I am also excited to see the advantages that
the software will have in my future career, working in conservation.
Overall
I had a very difficult time with the software and still feel like I do not understand
much of it. I do not think the software is very user friendly, and I think
someone who has no experience or very little will not have a clue on how to use
the technology without a detailed description on how to do it every time. Also
the software is not self-explanatory.
I felt like there were many useless steps and that some items were
placed in such a way that made it very difficult to locate. For example, the tutorial kept saying
to use the draw tool bar, but there was not such thing. Every time I logged onto the software I
would have to customize my tool bar and add the drawing tool to it, which was
very inconvenient since this was a feature that was used frequently when making
maps. I understand that the
tutorial was giving us a broad overview therefore we were doing basically a small
sample of everything we did.
However, I thought a lot of the steps were worthless, and very
repetitive especially when it would make you change something that you did
before, making the whole project very frustrating.
The
downside of the technology was the overall look of the system. For the leading
software in GIS I wasn’t very impressed about the layout of it. It looked very
outdated and I felt as though it could have been made to look more professional
and overall easier to navigate. It seemed to resemble an older version of
Microsoft. Another drawback of the
software is that it is too sensitive.
For instance, if you do one tiny thing wrong it could potentially
destroy your map causing you have to spend numerous hours deleting fixing and
redoing another map. This happened to me with the steps about the calculations,
when I entered the data what I thought was correctly, my map was distorted and
was not correct. So this was very frustrating to me and proved that the
technology is too sensitive.
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