Geographic Information System/Environments

Setting Coordinate system
Setting a coordinate system in ArcGIS useful because it will automatically change files you upload to your map to that coordinate system and you will not have edge issues with you data not matching up. To do this you go to the

Setting Work Spaces
Work spaces in ArcGIS is the setting where you tell the program where you are pulling the data from on your computer or cloud drive and where you wish to save all of the changes you make to data. The former is called your current workspace while the latter is called your scratch workspace. To set your workspaces go to the geoprocessing menu and click environments. Click the workspace tab and then select the file locations.

Relative Pathways
In ArcGIS when you move files around sometimes a red exclamation point will pop up next to file or map layer meaning that it no longer can be found in the file location it was stored in. Setting relative path names ensures that this doesn't happen, instead of searching for the file location it searches for the file name instead. To do this, go to map document properties under the file menu and click the check box at the bottom that reads 	store relative pathnames to data sources. To make this the default option go to the customize menu and click ArcMap options and select the general tab. Check the box that says make relative paths the default for new map documments.