[MUSIC] Hello again and welcome back. In this lesson I'm going to show you how to use layer files and layer packages to share symbology and layer data. To start with, I'll show you how to use layer files to share just the symbology of data. This is really easy, but it can be really handy sometimes if you want to save out specific styles for reuse in your own map documents, or to send people a common style that you need across your organization that they can apply to other datasets that you may not have. So to do that, I just right click on the layer, and do save as layer file. And I want to point out the save as layer file and the create layer package option here. Lots of people think layer files are layer packages. I'll show you what a layer package is in a moment, but for now we're using layer files, they are not the same. A dialogue box comes up offering me a spot to save my layer file. In this case I'll leave the default name and location the same and click Save. And what that did is it exported just the symbology information off of this layer to a file so I can re-use it elsewhere. To demonstrate, I'll switch to another map document with a different layer, and I'll symbolize it based on this layer. So, this layer here is from the same database, and would commonly be symbolized the same, but when i added it to ArcMap, it showed up just with the default symbology. So, what I'll do, is I'll right click on it and I will import the symbology by going to properties, going to symbology tab, and up here one thing we didn't point out before is this often unnoticed import button. And I will click import symbology definition from another layer in the map, or from layer file. So I could copy it from a layer in the same map if I had one, or I can click that browse button to open a layer file. So, I'll navigate to my layer file. And click on that, and click Add. And I can import the complete symbology definition here. Click Okay, and it immediately shows up the same way as it did on the other map. And I can click Apply, and Confirm it down here and click okay and see that, yeah it imported the symbology definition. This one wasn't very complex, but if I had symbology definitions that had field based symbology, it would ask me, what field in this current data set is the same as the field that the symbology is based on, and we can import and export these types of symbology as well. So, back to that original back document. What if I wanted to export a layer package, not just the symbology, but also the data, sort of like we did with our map packages? To do that, I will right click on the layer, and go to create layer package, and a familiar looking dialogue pops up for layer packaging. It has the same options as we had before to upload to the ArcGIS online account, or to save it to a file, and then we put in some description data, some required, and we also can add some additional files just like we could before. If I click upload package to my ArcGIS online account, I once again get that sharing option right in here. In this case, I'll save it locally since you all ready know how to upload this stuff to your ArcGIS online account. So let's go fill in that required data. I'll put extant range for hardhead. And I'll put the information on the system it came from, and hardhead, and range, and fish, and I'll leave everything else as it is for now. And I'll click analyze and we're good to go. And then I will click Share. And it goes through a familiar packaging procedure, compresses the data, and it saves it off to a file for me, and tells me where it is. So, now, if we switch back to the other copy of our GIS, I can then add the layer package into my map. To begin with, I'll change the symbology on this layer so that we can see better when we add the new layer on top of it. And then I will move this to one side of my screen, and zoom to this layer again so we can see it. And then I'll just add this layer here via drag and drop. And there it is. It appears right on top of the map there. Another thing to point out, since this is a layer package, it's also a zip file. And if I go to properties here again, and go to the source tab, I'll see that it was also unpacked to my packages directory. So it created a directory in there, and then it once again has a geo database in there for this layer. If I make changes to this layer here and save it, I will not have them saved back to this layer package. And, as a reminder, I can upload this package to ArcGIS online using the same methods we used in the last lesson, either, via publishing it directly there from the publish menu here, from the create layer package, or by taking layer package I just exported and manually uploading it. And that's it for this lesson. In this lesson I showed you how to use layer files to move symbology between map documents, and how to use layer packages to send data along with its symbology. These are pretty simple, but also very useful features to know how to use. See you next time.
