Subtitled: Why error messages are good. Came up with another error while running TopoToRaster but this time ArcGIS gave an error message that led to a solution. Turned out all my contour lines had an elevation of 16 which TopoToRaster did not like. I had intended to increase the elevation and inadvertently set them all to sixteen. I had saved the previous values before editing so it turned out to be a simple fix and I didn’t have to spend a day trying figure out what was wrong.

In running an automated process, I had a TopoToRaster repeatedly fail on me. The only input theme was a contour theme. The process ran fine when I used the envelope of the contour theme as the output extent but when I changed it to the envelope of a polygon theme, it would bomb. The polygon’s envelope was smaller than the contour theme. ArcCatalog would bomb out without presenting any sort of useful message.

Maybe I am just dense, but skimming ArcIdeas, I found out that the transparency for an icon is determined by the upper-left pixel. Don’t know if this is an ESRI convention or not but thought I would pass it one.

Ok, maybe I have been hiding under a rock, but just saw this is a post from James Fee’s Spatially Adjusted blog. ESRI has a public suggestion box called ArcGIS Ideas where users can submit suggestions for ESRI. One thing I like is that it is open for other users to see and comment. Not sure how responsive ESRI will be but at least it gives us a place to vent.

Right before the Users Conference, ESRI has released ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 Service Pack Haven’t had a chance to see what bugs this addresses yet.

Came across a new ArcMap bug today. A staff member was trying to join an Excel 2007 file (.xlsx) to a point shapefile in ArcMap and it did not appear to be working. She only had Office 2003 on her machine so I tried it on my spanking new machine that has 2007 installed. Same result–the fields get appended but they are all blank. I discovered, however, that when I had the table open, if I switched form showing ALL records to only the selected, Poof!