CE 451/551 Lab 4 –GIS Tutorials (from Manual A)

Read the sections and complete the “60 second tutorials” of Manual A. This lab should take about 4-5 hours. Begin this in the lab period today, and get as far as you can. You should make it through to about chapter 8 or 9. Don’t print out anything if asked to do so in the manual. A solid foundation in the GIS part of TransCAD will make the travel demand modeling part of TransCAD much easier. As part of the first exam, you may have some open book questions on how to complete some basic functions in TransCAD and terminology questions. For example, you may be asked to describe the main difference between a compact and standard geographic data file. If you complete the reading and do all of the tutorials, these will be quick answers. You will need to know where to find information in your manual very quickly, so don’t skip over the reading.

Hints: You may work on this lab individually or in teams of 3. If working in a team of 3, have the person in the middle run TransCAD. Have each person read silently the supporting material for each exercise (read fairly quickly, but do not skip sections – you will get faster at this as time goes on, and you will get better at selective reading. Then, have the person on the left read the 60 second tutorial exercises to the operator. Have the person on the right be the QC person. Switch positions every once in a while for variety and to give everyone experience. If working in a team of two, you will not have a QC person, but other suggestions apply.

Files: Make a local copy of the Tutorial files before working on them, so that you will have permission to edit the files. Note that there are 130 megs of files in the tutorial folder.

Errata:

p. 150, step 6 … the word “do” should be “to”

p. 200, step 6 … the word “data” should be “zip”

Following is a list of the material to be covered in this lab. Do all the 60 second tutorials on the pages below (with the prerequisite reading before each tutorial.)

Note: page 58.3. e.g., means 30% of the way down on page 58; page 99 means all of page 99

- Chapter 3 pp. 47-58.3, 62-64.2, 68.6-79.7

- Chapter 4 pp. 81-89.4

- Chapter 5 pp. 98.4-99

- Chapter 6 pp. 105-121.4, 124-125.7, 129-132.7, 138

- Chapter 7 pp. 139-159

- Chapter 8 pp. 169-176, 184-187, 191.5-205.2

- Chapter 9 pp. 217.5-219.3

- Chapter 10 pp. 227-237.8, 244.5-251

- Chapter 11 pp. 253-257

- Chapter 13 pp. 291-297, 300.5-309.5, 319.3-323.5

- Chapter 14 pp. 327-339.7

- Chapter 15 pp. 352.5-353

- Chapter 18 pp. 419-430.4, 437-451.6

- Chapter 20 pp. 483-491.5

- Chapter 24 pp. 561-580, 597.5-597.9

Deliverable:

To document that you have finished the lab on time, please submit screen shots taken at the end of each 5^th tutorial that you do (5^th, 10^th, …). These are the tutorials on the following pages:

- 73

- 110

- 150

- 176

- 203

- 249

- 309

- 422

- 569

To create the screen shots, before you close TransCAD at the end of the tutorial, hit the print-screen button. Then edit-paste (ctrl-v) into a word document. Click on the image in the word document and choose the format menu, and crop the image to your liking. If only one window is open with TransCAD, hitting the print-screen button while holding down the alt key will put only the active window into the buffer for pasting into word. Caution, if there are multiple windows open that you wish to document, alt-print screen may not copy all of them, and you will want to use the print screen button and crop ithe result in word. Hint: to make you word file smaller, use format-compress images prior to saving the final file. Submit an e-copy of your screen shots before next week’s scheduled lab period.