Admin Privileges: You need 'em

There are indeed worse interruptions to encounter during a productive working session than meeting that little error message that tells you that something has been denied because you do not have administrative privileges.  Still, it's an annoying little splinter that reminds you that you're not allowed to use your workstation.  This can range from opening clock on your task bar to quickly view the calendar in Windows Date and Time Properties to installing software.

If you're using ArcGIS, or any other GIS software for that matter, you need administrator privileges on your machine.  Here are a few reasons why:

ArcMap has a lot of advanced technical settings that can be changed to make the software work more efficiently for yourself or a specific project.  Many of these control the way the software interacts with your computer, so the settings are saved in the registry.  Registry keys are very sensitive and a lot can go wrong with just a little tweaking, so these are often off limits to non-admins.  Such settings can be found in the ArcMap Advanced Settings utility in the following directory:

<ArcGISHOME> \Utilities\AdvancedArcMapSettings.exe
(<ArcGISHOME> = C:\arcgis, or C:\Program Files\ArcGIS, etc.)

Further, there are a number of third party software utilities that are light, benign, and VERY HELPFUL when you're still learning your way around geoprocessing procedures.  ETGeoWizards is a great free package that has helped me through some projects.  There are dozens of processes that are very well organized.  Nine thumbs up.  XTools is another package that (I'm pretty sure) requires admin privileges to install.

Screenshot of ETGeoWizards for ArcMap

There are a hand full of other reasons why you should have access to your workstation, but these should suffice for now.

Update: 4/18/2011:
I received a request to justify administrative rights on my machine.  Here's my request:

"It is necessity for my workstation to continue to utilize administrative privileges due to the nature in which GIS software is used on a daily basis on my machine here at FDEP. ArcGIS has a number of advanced properties that often need to be managed by altering various registry settings for the software package. Further, I will be using Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET to author, test, and install a number of custom applications to use in conjunction with the ArcGIS interface. The usefulness of many of these customizations and other third party plug-ins require administrative privileges to work effectively."

Update: 5/10/2011:
Another instance of ArcMap Advanced Settings that require Admin privileges:

I'm editing a large statewide network of streams and just populated a new field of unique identifiers.  Upon saving these calculations, I received an error message reading, "Unable to save edits. File sharing lock count exceeded.  Increase MaxLocksPerFile registry entry."

This value can easily be changed via ArcMap Advanced Settings, under the Editor tab.  However this changes a value in the system registry (there is even a warning next to this setting in the application), so changing this setting -- among other similar tasks -- requires admin privileges.

Alternating Rounded Corners on Graphic Elements

I like legends that blend in with the neatline of a map but if there are disconnected graphical elements with rounded corners then a sharp corner will not match.

The solution is as simple as aligning graphical elements (drawing various shapes) and applying a Union process to make a single shape.

• Begin by adding two Rectangle elements and either a Circle or an Ellipse element (holding Ctrl while dragging the boundary of an ellipse will create a circle by keeping the aspect ratio of the width and height equal; the same goes for drawing a square with the Rectangle tool) to the Layout view of an ArcMap project

Add two Rectangles and a Circle

• Align the top of the circle with the tall rectangle and the right side of the circle with the wide rectangle.  This can be done by either using ruler guides or by selecting two objects and using alignment tools that may be on a toolbar, or by right clicking on the selected objects and choosing an alignment method from the Align sub-menu.

• Once the objects are aligned, select all three elements, right click on them and navigate to the Graphic Operations menu, and choose Union to blend all three objects together into a single element

From this point one can scale the curve smaller, use smaller circles to create sharper corners or ellipses for more gradually curving ellipses, combine these elements with others, or use other Graphic Operations to create more advanced features (Intersect , Subtract ); some even with negative space (Remove Overlap).

The following is a quick example of a few of these methods.  The inset title box was flipped horizontally, and a couple of additional boxes were Unioned to extend the space for the scale bar.  The north arrow box was simply a circle with three quarters Subtracted from a digitized polygon.  Guides assisted the alignment for clean and even corners.

Note: Since these are vector graphics, the elements can be easily scaled with a clean look.  In some cases, however, if the shapes are not aligned together precisely, distortions can occur where two elements were joined together.