Esri Maps for Office 1.0 release now available!

We’re pleased to announce the release of Esri Maps for Office v1.0 powered by ArcGIS Online.

Esri Maps for Office is a powerful add-in for Microsoft Office that brings the capabilities of Esri’s ArcGIS Online mapping platform to Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint users.

With Esri Maps for Office, you can easily create interactive maps of your organization’s data, enabling you to see patterns that graphs and charts cannot reveal. Any of the interactive maps you create can be embedded in PowerPoint, so you can make your presentations even more impactful. And by leveraging ArcGIS Online, you can quickly and securely share your interactive maps in web pages, blogs, and mobile apps as well as with ArcGIS users.

Within Excel, it takes just a few seconds to create an interactive map of your data. You can map your data regionally, such as by postal code, create point maps that show individual locations, generate heat maps to show where there are concentrations of points, and more. Esri Maps for Office gives you broad control over styling your mapped data, enabling you to make the important facts stand out.

In PowerPoint, maps can be inserted as static images or as “live” maps that you can interact with during your presentations. Live maps allow for zooming in and out, moving around the map, and displaying “pop-ups” with additional information about map features when you hover the mouse over them.

Several updates have been made from Beta to v1.0 to improve the overall performance and experience, including:

• Improved user experience for adding Excel data
• Export your point data enriched with location information
• Notification of errors when finding locations

To install Esri Maps for Office, visit the Esri Maps for Office page and click the Download link on the right under Quick Links. If you currently have the Public Beta version installed, you can install v1.0 simply by running the setup.

If you are traveling to the International User Conference in San Diego next week, please come by and see us at the Location Analytics Island in the Esri Showcase!

~Esri Maps for Office team

Using Yahoo! Pipes to create dynamic map layers

Yahoo! Pipes are a handy way to aggregate web feeds and other information from various sources. One way to think of Pipes is as a way to create data/information mashups, just like we can create ArcGIS Online web maps by mashing up a variety of map layers. An interesting aspect of Pipes is that we can leverage them in the context of our ArcGIS Online web maps, and use them to create dynamic layers using URL-located KML or CSV files as mappable information sources.

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Add Pinterest photos to ArcGIS Online web maps

Pinterest is a social photo sharing site that lets you create and manage “boards” of photos, usually organized around some theme. Pinterest users can browse other pinboards and ‘re-pin’ images in their own collections, or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the things they find interesting.”

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Downloadable tools for ArcGIS Server administration

With the release of version 10.1, automating administrative tasks on ArcGIS Server got a whole lot easier. The new ArcGIS Server Administrator API allows you to perform the same administrative tasks you can do in ArcGIS Desktop or ArcGIS Server Manager. Because it’s a REST-ful API, you can programmatically build up URLs to make calls to the server to perform tasks.

Using this API, I’ve published a sample that puts server admin tasks into an ArcGIS toolbox and ModelBuilder. The ArcGIS Server Administration Toolkit (download), written with Python, provides a variety of tools that you can use to administer the server. For example, there are tools for starting and stopping services, modifying log settings, registering server object extensions (SOEs), and publishing services from service definition files. You can chain these tools together in ModelBuilder to complete a workflow, or you can run them in a one-off fashion directly from the toolbox.

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Add Flickr photos to ArcGIS Online web maps

Add Flickr photos to ArcGIS Online web maps

by Bern Szukalski on July 3, 2012

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Flickr is one of the most popular photo sharing sites available, hosting well over 6 billion images. Here’s how to use your Flickr photos in your ArcGIS Online web maps.

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