Lee Nellis
Cyburbian
- Messages
- 1,369
- Points
- 29
GIS Gurus, I am confused.
I am the type of computer user who feels that if you have to open the owner's manual or a tutorial or consult help more than twice, the software should be scrapped. If you have to take a class to learn it, the developers should be shot.
Having hired others to make maps for me for some years, I had not tried to use a modern GIS until this week. I bought a suplus computer from a city that had not cleaned off the software and there was ArcView 3.1. I thought, WOW.
BUT, now that I have turned it on and tried to make it work, I am appalled.
Is it still impossible to make a GIS useable? Having found some data to play with, I cannot find many individual commands and no procedures that are intuitive. I sank to the level of finding an on-line tutorial, which partly confimed that even basics are not intuitive, and partly failed to answer my questions.
It would have been considerably faster for me to dig out the mylar and india ink to accomplish what I have been trying and failing to do today. I know you can't link an ink drawing to data, but as near as I can tell ArcView can't even take data directly from an Excel spreadsheet, which has to be the most common and easiest way to set up any simple database.
Is this as good as it gets?
I am the type of computer user who feels that if you have to open the owner's manual or a tutorial or consult help more than twice, the software should be scrapped. If you have to take a class to learn it, the developers should be shot.
Having hired others to make maps for me for some years, I had not tried to use a modern GIS until this week. I bought a suplus computer from a city that had not cleaned off the software and there was ArcView 3.1. I thought, WOW.
BUT, now that I have turned it on and tried to make it work, I am appalled.
Is it still impossible to make a GIS useable? Having found some data to play with, I cannot find many individual commands and no procedures that are intuitive. I sank to the level of finding an on-line tutorial, which partly confimed that even basics are not intuitive, and partly failed to answer my questions.
It would have been considerably faster for me to dig out the mylar and india ink to accomplish what I have been trying and failing to do today. I know you can't link an ink drawing to data, but as near as I can tell ArcView can't even take data directly from an Excel spreadsheet, which has to be the most common and easiest way to set up any simple database.
Is this as good as it gets?