#arcmap 10

I hardly ever actually MAKE maps in ArcMap (ironic yes), so I'm not familiar with the map view features, like legends. Today my boss wanted me to make a series of maps showing which wind farms are within 5km of all the Great Lakes, with all different colours. 

Step 1 was bringing in the point data, and symbolizing the points with unique categories, according to the name of the wind farm. There are over 40 different unique labels, and on the main map, this looked extremely messy. But the legend is also a BEAST. 

I want to zoom around the map showing different areas, but I didn't want to manually do anything. I did some Googling and looked on Stack Exchange - surprisingly there weren't too many good answers (or I didn't know what keywords to use). Finally I just trusted the good ol' right click on the Legend itself, and HALLELUJAH ArcMap to to the rescue! 

Clicking "Only show classes that are visible in the current map extent" in the Items tab will make the legend live and interactive, updating itself with whatever classes are currently visible. That's exactly what I wanted ^_^

Today I figured out something that's perhaps been obvious to others, but maybe not. 

I have 500 random points to zoom to on my map for an accuracy assessment. I am using the Bing Aerial Maps, which takes a while to load, so I've been zooming in on the point at 1:10,000. I'd been toggling off the basemap every time I zoomed to a new point, then manually adjusting the scale. I was at point 46/500 when I was like "surely there HAS to be a way to fix this scale!" So I went to trusty ol' Google. There are two different ways of fixing the map view scale: 

You can fix it for the entire Data Frame: 

But then when you go and try to "Zoom To Selected Feature" in the attribute table, nothing happens and I was like whaaaa- You have to use "Pan To" instead, which involves actually right-clicking that option from a drop-down menu every time. Ain't nobody got time for that.

So here's a much easier way to fix the scale, AND maintain the double-click Zooming to feature luxury. Fix the scale in the layer you are zooming around in by opening up the layer properties: