#gis tips

1000 appassionati di GIS, mappe e database: grazie GISTIPSTER 

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 ^_^