Zoom to Selected

Wednesday, 6 June, 2007

“Zoom to Selected” is a handy ArcMap tool. Once you select a feature, just click on this item in the Selection menu and it fills the data view with the items currently selected. Very useful for locating small features or running a query and then looking at where they are spatially located.

Except it doesn’t appear to work for raster layers. My son asked me a classic GIS question: “What is the highest point in Bedfordshire?” I could have just Googled it, but the GISer in me simply had to do this inside a GIS. A visit to Digimap allowed me to download a selection of OS Panorama raster DEM data. I also grabbed the county outline from UK Borders. This I used to clip the DEM (using Hawths Tools as Spatial Analyst seems to make such a pigs ear of it) to leave me elevations of Bedfordshire.

It was then simply a case of sorting the elevation column on the attribute table and selecting the highest value. A trip over to the “Zoom to Selected” and… it didn’t work. ESRI support suggests this is the case. I must have missed something blindingly obvious, but I can’t see a simple, obvious, way of quickly locating the highest point. In the end I zoomed in and scanned around the image until I found it, copied the coordinates and checked them on Streetmap. OK, so it wasn’t right bang on the (old) trig point on Dunstable Downs, but it was pretty close. Not bad when you think these are 50m pixels generated from contours.

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