FOR

Choosing

EFFICIENCY

BE MORE EFFICIENT

Section 1:

Get to the good stuff quicker

What do you love to do?

hike

view wildlife

eat out

visit the library

bike riding

watch football

Who wouldn’t enjoy watching me?

Let efficiency free you to be morecreativ

e

But don’t let efficiency become a

treadmill

IF YOUDON’T

HAVE ROOMTO FOLLOW

YOUR PASSION,MOVE ON

AUTOMATE

Section 2:

Learn different methods for doing repetitive tasks

Credit: Bruno Oliveira

I tend to overestimate this

and underestimate this

Credit: Bruno Oliveira

ModelBuilderDrag and drop

ArcGIS geoprocessing

tools

FMEConvert data

between spatialformats anddo a bit of

geoprocessing

CodeBuild what youwant, however

you want

AUTOMATEw/

MODELBUILDER

Section 3:

Drag and drop your way to better living

Don’t forget QGIS!

QGIS has a similar tool called Sextante

The strength of ModelBuilder is

ITERATION

Run through an entire geodatabaseand do some analysis

Run through an entire folderand do some analysis

Chain your analyses together…

to run at the click of a button.

AUTOMATEw/ FME

Section 4:

Play well with others

The strength of FME is

CONVERSION

Automate conversions like: CAD GIS

GIS KML Revit GIS

Clean up your data…

geometry errorsattributestopologydonut holesnull values

Identify changes toyour data

What did the intern do to

my database?!

Kick it up a notch and have conversions run via email request

AUTOMATEw/ CODE

Section 4:

Look really smart with a bit of copying and pasting

The strength of Coding is

NESTED LOOPScol = 0for row in xrange(dam_sheet.nrows):    if row > 0:                print dam_sheet.cell_value(row, col)        name = dam_sheet.cell_value(row, col)

rows = arcpy.SearchCursor(inputxs)        def round_figures(x, n):            return round(x, int(n \ - math.ceil(math.\ log10(abs(x)))))        for row in rows:            station = str(round_figures\ (row.ProfileM, 7))            flow = str(row.Breach_Flow)  

If this, then that.use user input to guide

You can also run things in different

programs

Version Control

Collaborate with co-

workers

Collaborate with interwebs

Make liberal use of Windows Scheduler to run scripts

I may be playing, but my computer

is working

Summary:

1. Efficiency | to end drudgery

2. Automate | learn the tools

3. ModelBuilder | for iteration

4. FME | for conversion

5. Code| for nested loops

Get in touchBond Harper is an Analyst for Arup (a global engineering firm)

in Los Angeles, CA

Email: bond.harper@arup.comTwitter: @bondaharperLinkedin: Bond Harper