Promote selected records

04-01-2010 06:34 AM
Status: Open
Labels (1)
New Contributor II

Bring back the promote functionality in the attribute table...

Love it.  Excellent Idea.  Clicking Selection takes so much resources, while Promote just worked.
This was one of the more useful tools in ArcView.  The only reason I think it is not more requested is that people just don't know what they are missing. 90% of the people I talked to that used AV 3.3 loved this feature and missed it when it went away.  It provides more felxibility in viewing your data.  Let me give an example. You select some census tracts and you want to see how they rank in population as a group compared to the rest of the table.  Here's how you do it with the promote button. 

First, sort your table in ascending order on population
Second, you push the promote button.

All your info is available to look at, at a glance.  I can see how my group ranks, and how the other non selected data rank in context.  Want to add something to your promoted group from the non selected group?  No problem, just select a record, and press promote again.  As opposed to only showing selected, this is a much better workflow for me.


I completely agree with Michael.  It seems that most of the current GIS professionals never had to use ArcView 3.x, so they don't know what they are missing.  The ability to select/promote/sort tabular records is incredibly useful and powerful.  I used this functionality all the time when trying to clean up a join between an "outside" table and a shapefile.  I  don't understand why the Table functions get progressively worse with every iteration of ArcMap.  It sounds odd, but to bring back core ArcView 3.x functionality would greatly enhance ArcMap or Pro.  PLEASE.


I agree, if there is one feature from 3.3 that I miss it is the PROMOTE option.  I use to use it all the time and wish they would bring it back.   Michael Nicholas did a great job of explaining how it worked but you have know idea of the impact until you actually get to use it.  Now that it's gone so many years most users today have know idea what they are missing, are even understand it and how it would help.