Follow the dawning realisation that the GIS world is far too busy analysing the world Elliot Hartley, Teresa Baldwin & Dragons8mycat have begun to put together a list of useful add-ins so that we can share in our useful tips & tricks.

Free Tools

• ArcBruTile – Map tile addin for ArcGIS, allows use of OSM, Stamen, Bing and other WMS/WMST background maps
• OS Opendata Basemaps – Free Ordnance Survey basemaps through ESRI UK, all styled (including greyscale)  including Vectormap, boundaryline, strategi & 1:250k
• LASTools – A set of free tools for working with point cloud data. Extremely efficient and useful for working with big data
• Tools for Graphics and Shapes v. 2.1.85  – Free tools with a great little tool to calculate the true area of objects and to create centroids of polygons easily. (Thanks to François Goulet)
• Easy Calculate 10 – This is a .NET version of the excellent EC50 tool by Ian Ko. Tools for adding random numbers to attributes, get feature scale, max & min azimuth amongst a few (Thanks to Geographic Design)
• Get XYZM – Unlike the geometry calculator already in ArcGIS, this tool allows you to automatically add the columns and gives a text entry option so that you can name the fields as you want. (Thanks to Geographic Design)
• Polygon to centreline – Useful tool for creating a centreline from any polygon. (Thanks to Geographic Design)
• Batch Export & Print – An invaluable tool for export of multiple mxds…without the need to open them individually. Warning! May have issues with ArcGIS 10.1 sp1

Free (limited) Tools

• ET Geowizards – Add-in for ArcGIS which provides many free vector conversion tools.
• Xtools Pro – Add-in for ArcGIS with additonal tools, some are free though the full version is relatively cheap. Tools include the “Extract map” which will extract all data in the dataframe to a new geodatabase!

Purchase Tools