Week 4 Assignment: My First Real Map

The assignment was to create a map using the ArcGIS tutorial. During this assignment, I discovered the incredible potential of ArcGIS: the potential to create wonderful, instructive maps and manipulate data in ways never possible before and the potential to frustrate beyond belief. The assignment sounded easy enough, but turned out to be the most difficult lab of the quarter.
There many problems with this lab, which made the lab very time consuming and stressful. The biggest problem was definitely that the tutorial was not made for the same version of ArcGIS as the version that we were using in our lab. In our labs, we have the most recent version of ArcGIS: 10. However, the tutorial was written for the use of a later version. While the versions have many similarities, there are enough differences to get a new user lost time after time.
Another pitfall of ArcGIS is that it is very time consuming and not very user friendly. While ESRI is working towards making their products more user friendly with products like ArcExplorer, the software is still extremely difficult to maneuver. Each step of the map creating process requires extensive knowledge of the program and computers in general. Even getting the data into a format that ArcGIS will accept is so incredibly difficult. This is perhaps ESRI's biggest pitfall. If they want to become more widely used and known, they will need to make it much easier to use their products.
Despite the pitfalls just mentioned, ArcGIS has such brilliant potential. The moment when I saw my first real map that I created, I was overwhelmed with joy and felt so accomplished. With ArcGIS, users can manipulate data in ways that have never been so widely offered before. The program allows users to create beautiful maps and show data in ways that can and will affect every area of business, government, and life in general. It has become the standard to have magnificent maps in office presentations. As the program becomes easier to use, its user base will grow and so will its reach and influence.