Exercise 1: Organizing your linear referencing data in ArcCatalog

Complexity: Beginner Data Requirement: ArcGIS Tutorial Data Setup Goal: Organize the linear referencing tutorial data in ArcCatalog.

The exercises in this chapter use the tutorial data distributed with ArcGIS and work with an ArcView license. Some of these exercises require you to make changes to the data; therefore, you will need to have write access to the data. To be sure you have write access, you will begin this exercise by making a working copy of the LinearReferencing tutorial folder.

Copying the data

Steps:

1. Start ArcCatalog by clicking Start > All Programs > ArcGIS > ArcCatalog 10.
2. Navigate to the LinearReferencing folder on the local drive where the tutorial data is installed—for example, C:\arcgis\ArcTutor\LinearReferencing.

   If the data was installed by your system administrator in a shared folder on the network, the path to the tutorial folder includes the names of the computer and the connection through which the folder is accessed—for example, \\dataserver\public\ArcGIS\ArcTutor\LinearReferencing.

3. Right-click the LinearReferencing folder and click Copy.
4. Navigate to the location where you would like to make a copy of this data, such as the C drive.
5. Right-click this location and click Paste.

   A new folder called LinearReferencing is created at this location.

6. Right-click this new folder and click Rename.
7. Type MyLR as the new folder name.
   

Connect directly to your tutorial data

In ArcCatalog, folder connections let you access specific directories on local disks or shared folders on the network. Further, database connections allow you to access the contents of a database.

Steps:

1. Click the Connect To Folder button on the Standard toolbar.
   
2. Navigate to and choose the location of your MyLR folder.
3. Click OK.
   

The new folder connection is now listed in the Catalog tree.

You will now be able to access all the data needed for the remaining exercises in this tutorial via the new connection.