Creating an Arc Map project (*.mxd) document that can travel.

(Portable ArcMap Document)

2011 Maria Fernandez, Charlie Schweik

Note: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

Sometimes you need to move your GIS project to other computer, save it to some media
and use it somewhere else, or share it with other people at your enterprise or company.
The Arc Map document contains links to all the data sets present in the document, as well
as information to display such data sets. Such links are preserved in the form of paths
to the data, that you can see when you click source tab in the table of contents.
If at any time you change the location of some of the data layers, the map document is
going to be pointing to a wrong location and the data wont be able to be displayed:

When this occurs, you can fix individually each link right clicking the data set, going to
properties, source, and SET DATA SOURCE, browsing to the new location of the data
set.

20

Thats how you fix the links if the need arises, but there are several ways to minimize
those broken links.
One is dont mess with your data sets, moving them between folders if you need to
move a data set, just copy it and paste it in other location, leaving a copy wherever Arc
Map wants to find it.
But this is the most general way in which you can move a whole project successfully to
other computer: when you create the Arc Map document, or at any time, you can make
those links to the data flexible or portable, so when you open your Arc Map document
somewhere else, Arc Map can find the data and display in the table of contents.
In ArcMap Go to FILE > MAP DOCUMENT PROPERTIES > Click Store
relative path names to data sources. DONE!
As long as you move the folder with the data layers and the *.mxd Arc Map document all
together, you can put it in any location in other computers.

21

Do some experiments saving arc map projects using this option, and saving them to a CD
and opening them in other computers. You can also practice this principle just moving
the folder to other location in your computer. REMEMBER: *.mxd project does not carry
the DATA!!! Only the paths or links to the data. You need to save and move the data
layers together with your Arc Map project.

22