I recently read with particular interest a press release by the management consultancy company Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) predicting long-term trends in the Oil & Gas (O&G) industry. Their analysis highlights, amongst others, the critical role that data is going to play for the industry: “Data will continue to create differentiators”. O&G is a data-intensive…
Read detailsIn a previous Training Tip blog (“Hyperlinking to Document Pages)” we discussed how to link features in ArcMap to external documents such as PDFs, and launch them using an appropriate viewer application. If you are interested in viewing data such as seismic sections, which are stored as images, it is actually possible to do this within ArcMap itself…
Read detailsThis is the second part of a two part blog that provides details of how to configure access to various corporate resources. In Part 1 we looked at configuring map templates, style files and coordinate reference systems. In Part 2 we will cover toolboxes and metadata style sheets and also briefly mention the Advanced Settings utility that is provided…
Read detailsIt is possible to configure various aspects of ArcGIS Desktop, such as the storage location of corporate map templates, by amending Windows registry settings. Further settings can be configured by placing files into the individual users’ profile folders. These capabilities allow for the efficient enterprise-wide deployment of ArcGIS Desktop, ensuring that each user has access…
Read detailsIn our earlier Exprodat blog Creating Geological Block Diagrams, we showed how to create block diagrams using satellite imagery and a digital elevation model. In this blog I look at how to make block diagrams directly from gridded surfaces, creating visual representations of the blocks. The workflows described require ArcGIS Desktop along with the 3D…
Read detailsThis training tip follows on from our previous blog “Top 10 ArcGIS Printing Checks“, and introduces some of ArcGIS 10.1’s dynamic legends capabilities. The problem You’ve got a good map, but your legend is stopping it from being a great map: In older versions of ArcGIS, you could either put up with the deficiencies, or spend…
Read detailsWhen you want to run the same geoprocessing tool on many feature classes, one option is to right click the tool and select the batch option, but it can be tedious to add all your datasets to the list – the entry columns have to be widened to check that the paths have been entered…
Read detailsCan the Renewable Energy industry leverage the lessons learnt by its Oil & Gas brother? Last year the Renewable Energy Focus magazine published the feature “Oil, Gas and Wind: offshore harmony?” which argues that there are opportunities for skills transfer between the Renewable Energy (RE) and Oil & Gas (O&G) sectors. The feature highlights various areas where this…
Read detailsHow to calculate the true distance over a surface A point-to-point distance taken from a map does not provide a true measurement of the distance between those points; I have to take the intervening topography into account, as shown below. To calculate the 3D length of a line (in ArcMap, with the 3D Analyst extension)…
Read detailsConfirmation Bias: a tendency of people to favour information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses: Wikipedia*. It’s a terrible disease for the petroleum explorer. Succumbing to confirmation bias often leads to overconfidence in one’s ability to predict outcomes, technical risk underestimation and poor decision making. Wishful thinking syndrome is also a common side effect, and the…
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