Rick Ellis

Which Mapping Products Are “Better”, ESRI’s Or Autodesk’s?

I’ve heard the question many times, and I’ve heard a lot of answers. “ESRI’s products make inaccurate maps”, claim some AutoCAD users, while some ArcGIS users feel that “AutoCAD ruins our coverages”.  In reality, BOTH families of products are excellent for certain tasks, and not so good for others, but the gap is closing and …

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Thematic Mapping

With the introduction of the Display Manager in Autodesk MAP 3D 2005, you now have a better way to create thematic maps from your AutoCAD drawings.  A thematic map uses properties like color and line width to display objects by data classifications. An example of this is a map of pipelines where you use different …

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Need to Find Objects in your Drawings? Just Ask!

AutoCAD Map 3D, which is sold as a stand-alone application, but is also included with Land Desktop and Civil 3D, allows you to use queries.  Using queries, you can search through one or many drawings and identify, select, isolate, modify and/or copy drawing objects and extract information that would otherwise be extremely tedious and difficult to …

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