Hillsborough County Government Online - Heat

The Official County Government Online Information Resource

November 21, 2008

Measuring Distances
Perhaps you want to measure the distance from your house to the nearest shelter,hospital, or firestation. You can measure distance on maps using the Measure Distance tool.Select the tool, click on the start location (A) and then click on the end location (B). As you move the cursor, you can see how far the pointer is from the start location in the Segment length box. The distance between the two points is given.

If you are interested in the length of a line with multiple stops (more nodes), simply add additional nodes. The length of the new segments will be added to the previous total. In this example, you can see that three stops were added. The total round trip distance is 19539.9 feet. Once you have drawn the route, you can print the map.

. Remember this tool! The Clear Selection tool clears/unselects any selected features, distance measurement lines, etc. Unless you want to print a map with features selected (they usually appear shaded yellow) it is a good idea to hit this button before you create a print page. Finding Records You can search the attribute database for a particular record.Suppose you are trying to find LimeRick Dr

You would make the roads layer active and hit the Find button. This only works if the right layer is active. The panel you see above will pop up. After you type in "LIMERICK" (you don't know if "Drive" is abbreviated to "DR" in the database so you leave it out), you click the Find String button on the panel. The computer searches the database and highlights the feature on the map or brings an attribute table then select your selection by the record number. Selecting Features with Attribute Queries You can select records using a logical expression called a query which selects records based on certain attribute criteria. The Query button opens the query panel seen below.

This is essentially asking, Where are the features that have these specific attributes? In this example, you will select all the records in the shelter layer that have open shelters. First, you select the Field 'Opening', then select the like in the Operator box. At this point you can enter a value into the Value box, or click the Get Samples button to see a list of the values that exist in the database. You select OPEN as the threshold value. You then click the Add to Query String button. At this point you could add more criteria to our query string, but let's not get carried away. When the Execute button is clicked, the computer runs the expression and the results are displayed on the map and the corresponding attribute table displays.

Selecting Features Spatially You can also select specific spatial features and look at their attributes. This is essentially asking, What are the attributes of these specific features? To do this, you select the layer of interest and then pick how you want to select the features. First, you can draw a selection rectangle using the Select by Rectangle tool. Every feature touched by the rectangle is selected and the associated attributes display as a table.


The "hotlink" or hyperlink tool is what lets you bring up Web pages when you click on one of the triangles. Make the hyperlink tool active (with a red rectangle around it) and click on a triangle. NOTE: this tool requires that you get right on top of the hot link. If you are even a little bit away from the middle of the triangle, you'll see a dialog box saying, "Unable to hyperlink." Just click on the OK button and try again

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