The Basics Part 1 (Video)

This is the first of three videos intended to show you how to use the basic features. These three videos cover ninety percent of the everyday mapping tasks that a system operator would do at their desk or in the field. This video assumes you already have a map developed of your system. If that's not the case, see videos 201 and 202 for a guide on how to get started mapping. Lastly, this video assumes that you already know how to log into your map. If that's not the case, watch video 101 first. Let's get started. The most common place you're going to visit on this map is the list of layers. This is where you go to turn layers off and on. You do that by just checking the box next to the layer name. For example, I click here to turn the fire hydrants on. I click here to turn the meters off. This way you can have only those layers displayed that you're wanting to work with. It keeps the map from getting cluttered. The layer list has two sections at the top. Up here is the list of base layers, and down below is the map layers. The base layers are the Google content that shows up in the background of your map, and the map layers are the layers you're going to add. The base layers have a few options. There's a road selection which shows a basic road map. There's terrain which shows some relief the aerial photography we were looking at. What we recommend is, you leave it set here at the auto select. That simply means that as you zoom out, it's going to change to roads. As you zoom in, it's going to change to the aerial photography. There's a lot more you can do here than just turn layers off and on. You can also browse the contents of a layer. Let me turn my water meters back on and click on the layer name. This takes me to a list of every water meter in the system. I can pick any item in this list and it takes me to where that feature is located. I scroll down, and pick another one. That's where it's located. I can also expand this list to see all the details. You can also search from here at the top. We're on the Browse tab right now. If I click on the search tab, I can type in "abandoned" and click search. Now it returns every meter that has the word "abandoned" found in any of the fields, then I can pick one of these, and see, there it is. So, this list here is showing the nine meters that were found. I can click Browse Full Index to return to the list of all the meters. Now, if I click back, I go back to the Layer List. Let's try that on another layer. If I click Fire Hydrants, I can go to Search. This time, I'm going to do an Advanced Search. I click here, and I want to come in here. Say I want to see every fire hydrant that has a size that is less than 5 inches. I want to see any hydrant that is made by Mueller, and I click Search. You can see it found only two hydrants. I can pick one of those and see where it's at, or click Browse Full Index to return to the full list of fire hydrants. You can also sort this list if you click in any column heading like Size. It now sorts all the fire hydrants by size. If I come over here to Made By and click there, it sorts them all by the manufacturer. Now, to see the details like I showed you, you can click on any feature in your list, or you can just click on any feature you see in the map. To see those same details that are displayed, you can scroll through all the attributes about that individual feature. That's how you use the list of layers. More to come in the next video.