1. Overview and Installation

1.1 What can I do with this CD?

As a stand alone desktop application, USGS National Assessment is a complete, easy-to-use GIS data viewer. With USGS National Assessment you can:

• View and query ESRI Shapefiles
• View information about tracts and their associated rationales
• Identify, locate, and query geographic and attribute data
• Use standard pan and zoom tools to navigate the data
• Display image file formats including JPEG, BMP, TIFF, and others
• Build queries on selected data layers
• Analyze relationships of different data layers
• Select certain areas and parts of data layers for further analysis
• Use the browser tool to view metadata and associated descriptive data

1.2 Can I install the data on my hard drive to improve performance?

Here are the steps to install the data on the hard drive and make it accessible to the application:

1. If you haven't already, install the application using the setup program on the CD
2. Copy the data, images, html, and Documentation directories and their contents to the install directory used in step 1.
3. Edit the na.gxp file in the install directory:
   • Change the Local=No line to Local=Yes
   • Add a line DataPath=<absolute path> where <absolute path> is the full path to the install directory, terminated with a backslash. For example, if you installed the application and copied the directories to c:\na, the data path statement would be DataPath=c:\na\.
4. Start the application from the Start menu.

                [Project]
                NumDefs=0
                Multiple=No
                DefaultDb=geodata.mdb   
                Local=Yes
                DataPath=d:\nationalassessment\
                Profile=No

1.3 What are the optimum System requirements for running the application?

This depends in part on the speed of your CD-ROM. To achieve overall good performance reading data from the CD, you should probably have:

• 16x or faster CD-ROM
• 200Mhz Pentium or faster
• Windows 95 or Windows NT (service pack3)

1.4 Why does the application crash or behave erratically under Window 98?

The application has not been tested under Windows 98.