It’s important to note that support for ArcMap is set to retire by March 2026, and Mature Support starts in March 2024. As many of you migrate to ArcGIS Pro, you may find there are options or functionality in ArcMap that you miss or need to perform your workflows efficiently. So, we are doing all we can to bridge the gap between the two applications as we encourage you to upgrade to ArcGIS Pro.

By popular demand, we have incorporated a few features new to ArcGIS Pro 3.2 that were available in ArcMap.

Calculate Field support for VB expressions

In ArcGIS Pro 3.2, the Calculate Field tool now supports expressions in VBScript. This feature is helpful for users migrating to ArcGIS Pro who do not want to update their existing field calculator expressions from ArcMap (which uses VBScript as the default expression language).

On the Calculate Field tool, you can find the VBScript option in the Expression Type parameter drop-down. Further, your ArcMap models and scripts that use VBScript expressions can now be run in ArcGIS Pro 3.2 as-is.

Even though VBScript is supported, we still encourage you to update your field calculations to Python, Arcade, or SQL expressions for improved performance, functionality, and cross-product support in ArcGIS.

Icons for custom script and model tools

In ArcMap, geoprocessing tools could be added as buttons to toolbar and menu locations, and you could even assign these buttons custom icons. Then a click of the button would open the tool.

In ArcGIS Pro, you can customize the Pro user interface with geoprocessing tools. New in ArcGIS Pro 3.2, you can assign custom icons to model and script tool properties, and these icons will display in the following locations:

1. Quick Access Toolbar
2. Analysis tool gallery
3. Ribbon

You can use custom icons if you want to add a finishing touch or branding to your custom tools. Or if you have multiple model and script tools that you want to distinguish easily. This makes it easier than ever to locate your custom tools around the Pro user interface.

How to assign icons to custom tools

In the Catalog pane or, new in ArcGIS Pro 3.2, at the top of the Geoprocessing pane’s Toolboxes tab you will find the custom toolboxes that have been added to your project. Complete the following steps to assign an icon to a tool in one of these toolboxes:

1. Right-Click the a model or tool that is saved to an ArcGIS toolbox (.atbx). NOTE: icons cannot be applied to tools in a legacy toolbox (.tbx) or Python toolbox (.pyt) file.
2. Select Properties to open the tool’s properties window.
3. Click on the default icon to change it.

Tip: If you are newly migrating from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro, you can set a Geoprocessing option for ArcGIS Pro to automatically check your script or model tools for compatibility, or use the Analyze Tools for Pro tool to manually check for compatibility.

Improved Keyboard Navigation for Geoprocessing tools

If you prefer to use your keyboard rather than a mouse to navigate through applications, you’ll be pleased that the ArcGIS Pro 3.2 release had some major updates regarding working with keyboard shortcuts. In the geoprocessing framework, we also made our keyboard commands easier to use to speed up your workflows.

On geoprocessing tools, use the Tab key to sequentially navigate through focused parameters. When entering values for a parameter that accepts multiple inputs, you can now use the Enter key to commit the specified value and automatically add another entry ready for you to type in another value, without losing focus of the Geoprocessing pane.

Summary

We hope that these updates remove more barriers for users who want to migrate from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro. Be sure to check out the documentation page For ArcMap users migrating to ArcGIS Pro to get started. If you are looking for geoprocessing tools or functionality in Pro that are available in ArcMap, you can make a request to the ArcGIS Pro Ideas Community using the Geoprocessing label.

This ArcGIS Solutions Roadmap gives you a sneak peek of the major capabilities we are focused on in 2024. Near-term will be available in Q1 2024 and mid-term in Q2 2024. Long-term capabilities are in the plan and slated for a Q4 2024 release but we will revise this roadmap mid-year to ensure it reflects our latest plans.

As with any roadmap, capabilities are tentative and may evolve, be delayed, or removed from the roadmap as priorities change. The continued development or release of a solution is at the sole discretion of Esri.

Please contact us if you are interested in partnering with the ArcGIS Solutions team on any of the capabilities listed above. We value those partnerships greatly and your contributions can help the entire GIS community grow. If you would like to see us develop a solution that is not currently in our portfolio or plans, please share your ideas on ArcGIS Ideas.

For more information on the latest ArcGIS Solutions release, see What’s New.

If you haven’t (or if it has been a while), give it a try!

It’s a powerful spatial analysis tool that helps us find statistically significant clusters in our data. These clusters help us confirm if the patterns we perceive when observing a map are worth our attention and resources.

Hot Spot Analysis is one of the foundational spatial analysis tools – it’s often the first tool we run to start uncovering spatial patterns in our data. But have you ever considered how the neighborhoods you choose in this tool can change the results?

When you run Hot Spot Analysis, you select a conceptualization of spatial relationships, and this defines the neighborhoods used in the analysis. Like with many other Spatial Statistics tools, a useful analysis depends on defining and thinking critically about what it means for a feature to be considered near another feature. For example, you might say that features sharing a boundary, or features within 150 kilometers of each other, are considered neighbors. A slight difference in the definition of a neighborhood can lead to important differences in the results, so this is a critical part of the analysis to understand, decide, and communicate with your results.

But it is often difficult to fully understand and select appropriate neighborhoods when doing analysis. Today, we select and decide on neighborhoods using dropdowns and parameter settings – hardly an inviting or interesting way to think about geography!

To help you understand and explore neighborhoods, ArcGIS Pro 3.2 now includes Neighborhood Explorer: an experience that will help you learn about and refine your spatial statistics analysis. Here’s the basics of how it works:https://mediaspace.esri.com/embed/secure/iframe/entryId/1_e41doodp/uiConfId/49806163

Beyond exploration, neighborhood definitions can be edited, saved, and shared. For example, a starting definition of neighborhoods leaves an island without neighbors. This may be perfectly reasonable, but if domain knowledge suggests that the island is closely related with coastal communities across a strait, you can manually edit and add neighbors to that feature to better reflect the spatial relationships in the data. The resulting neighborhood definition can be saved as a spatial weights matrix file, and used in Spatial Statistics tools or shared with colleagues for reproducibility.

Neighborhood Explorer shines when used alongside Spatial Statistics tools, but it can also help you explore connections in your data.

For example, the U.S. Census Bureau publishes commuting journey to work data and you can use this data to create a spatial weights matrix and visualize the connections using Neighborhood Explorer. Once a location is clicked, you can explore commute patterns: the clicked location displays where people reside, and the neighbors correspond to where people that live in that location are commuting to. These aren’t simple spatial relationships where we define a distance or use contiguity.

Neighborhood Explorer is a capability that helps you learn about spatial relationships and refine your analysis. We hope it also helps you communicate these concepts, and help propagate the importance of geography as we understand the world.

“Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”

Waldo ToblerGeographer