For about the last decade John Calkins, and more recently Joe Holubar, have been counting down what they see as the Top 10 Improvements in the latest release of ArcGIS for Desktop during the Plenary of the Esri International User Conference.  For me it is always one of the UC highlights and I greatly appreciate the efforts of the developers and presenters that lead up to it.

With July 8, ArcGIS 10.2 and this year’s UC fast approaching I thought I would help them out with what I would like to see Esri include in ArcGIS for Desktop 10.2 (and maybe demonstrated during that session).

Coming in at #10 are Grid and Graticule Improvements:

• Graticule Support in ArcPy so that we can modify intervals at run-time for features needing to be displayed at different scales when creating on-demand maps or map books (or as a stop gap measure to make available Grids and Graticules XML files for Australia.  Related requests have also been for:
  • Data Driven Pages to have automatic grid intervals
  • Grid intervals to change proportionally as the scale changes
  • Map grids and graticules to be scale dependent
• Localization for spelling of “metres”, etc which is needed in Australia but also in Canada
• Reference Grid (Graticule & Measured Grid) label format options to be enhanced to, in particular, enable Zero Padding In Labels

If you are keen to see these too, then follow the links to find corresponding ArcGIS Ideas awaiting your vote.