By Nicolas R. Malloy September 3, 2025

Introduction

In this lab, you will become acquainted with the ArcGIS Pro interface. This is an introductory tutorial designed to help you get re-acquainted with the ArcGIS Pro interface using a fun and creative exercise. You will learn how to create and edit shapefiles (point, polyline, and polygon vector files) by designing your own personal dream island. As you bring your island to life, you will also add descriptive information, known as attributes, to the features you create and work with basic cartographic elements to design a final map. In the end, you'll create two small, beautiful maps of your dream island—one site map and one locator map.

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Estimated time to complete this tutorial: 3 hours

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Learning Outcomes

• Upon successful completion of this lab, you will be able to:
• Organize a GIS project using a standardized folder structure.
• Create and configure a new ArcGIS Pro project.
• Download, add, and symbolize data to create a custom basemap.
• Create new shapefiles (point, polyline, and polygon).
• Digitize new vector features using editing tools.
• Modify a layer's attribute table to add new data.
• Apply labels to features based on their attributes.
• Create and export a map layout.

Getting Started: Setting Up Your Workspace

By now, you should be familiar with the file management protocols that are essential for any GIS project. In a typical workflow, you will perform your geospatial analysis using a local hard drive, like your computer’s desktop. When you are finished, you will compress and back up your work to cloud storage so you can retrieve your files from anywhere. For this tutorial, we will use the desktop as our local project location.

First, on your computer desktop, create your main project folder and name it "Dream_Island." Be sure that there are no spaces in the name, as this can sometimes cause problems with GIS software. You can always use an underscore instead of a space to separate words. Inside this project folder, create the three subfolders we will use in this course: original, working, and final. The original folder is for your unaltered source data, working is for data you create during the project, and final is for your outputs like maps and reports. This standard structure is designed to keep your projects organized.

Figure 1: Establishing an organized workspace is the first step in any GIS project.

Downloading the Project Data