From the waht’s new at 9.2 session… The Biggest complaint regarding usability was that it required too many mouse clicks to do something. Within ArcMap ESRI has repaired some 600 issues with a strive for consistency across all applications. Hundreds of new shortcuts added for faster navigation Some of the other fixes you’ll find waiting for you in 9.2 include:
– added support for the mouse-wheel. Drag map and scroll to zoom in/out. Right click context menu with many shortcuts.
– Customize where the full extent action takes you. Very useful if publishing to the web as that property is adopted and applied to your data properties.
– Birds-eye map viewer window – view your window with none of the ArcMap “stuff” around it. Very useful for those of you with dual monitor workstations!
– Easily add your own scales into the scale control dialog – automatically converts your units to a common format
– Very easy to annotate your maps with locations and coordinates
– More robust measurement tool, supports many units, click on any feature and retrieve the area in any unit desired.
– Simple access to tabular data. View very large field contents, easy turn on/off data fields to see only what you need.
– Easy to calculate area of a feature via calculate geometry dialog – also ability to add unit abbreviation characters into the field for labeling.
– Select multiple features to create subsets of your data, simple add/remove ability.
– Online documentation with flash animations of what’s coming – see ESRI.com homepage for article on What’s new in 9.2 (220+ pages as a PDF)
– New search engine supporting documentation
Making great looking maps (without using other apps)
– added intelligent, reactive symbology
– improved productivity
– more control over symbols
– customize symbology to individual features and drive the symbology by attributes of data
– graphic conflict detection according to pre-defined rules
– expanded animation capabilities
– multi-dimensional support for NetCDF – commonly used format for use with oceanographic and hydrologic data modeling
– Improved 3D usability with new geoprocessing tools, addition of terrains and a terrain data format, and 3D visualization improvements.