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The first set of data you will be working with contains the Houston Police Department (HPD) beat boundaries. Though it has been modified for the purposes of this tutorial, the original data was obtained from the City of Houston GIS Database webpage, which is no longer available, but the same original data can be obtained from the GIS/Data Center data collection.
- In the Catalog pane on the right, expand the Databases folder.
- Expand the Geoprocessing.gdb geodatabase.
- Right-click the HPDBeats_North feature class and select Add To New Map.
- Right-click the HPDBeats_South feature class and select Add To Current Map.
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At this point, you wish to combine the north and south police beats into a single layer. You will do so using a geoprocessing tool.
- On the ribbon, click the Analysis tab.
- Within the first Geoprocessing group, click the Tools button.
Notice that the Geoprocessing pane has opened on the right side of the screen, where as a new tab on top of the Contents pane was, a Geoprocessing pane appears.. Typically, you would use the 'Find Tools' search box to search for the name of the tool you'd like to use, but, at times, especially when learning the software, it can be helpful to view the full hierarchy of all the tools available, because you will often discover related and helpful tools that you didn't know existed and wouldn't know to search for. You might also completely forget the name of a tool, but be able to locate it based on the hierarchy. For these reasons, we will be manually navigating the toolboxes for this tutorial. The more typical workflow of searching directly for a specific tool will be covered briefly at the end of the tutorial.
- At the top of the Geoproccessing pane, click the Toolboxes tab.
- Click the Data Management Tools toolbox > In the Geoproccessing pane, select Toolboxes, and then click Data Management Tools toolbox > General toolset > Merge tool.
- In the upper right corner of the ‘Merge’ pane, click the tool, hover over the help button.
Read the Merge pane help and review the sample illustration. Notice that this tool merges two like datasets covering different geographic extents together in into a single dataset.
- In the ‘Input Datasets’ drop-down menu, click the drop-down arrow and select the HPDBeats_South layer.
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