Manually creating the "Pages" in Data Driven Pages?

Question

I was wondering if it was possible to manually create data driven pages to then put together into a data driven page model?

I have a couple thousand address points sorted into about 20 area categories in my municipality in a points master layer.

In the data driven page setup I used the "area category" field in the attribute table as the "sort, name, pages" field. This has netted me a page per address point. Is there a way to either make a page per category, manually or otherwise?

Forgot to add that I have a basic personal use License.

• Bera: You could dissolve by area category with option multipart. Then use this as index layer (with no symbology)
• Dan C: @BERA you should make that an answer, that's simpler than my solution.
• Chris Medyna: @BERA Could you clarify further? I tried dissolve, input being the master layer, made sure multipart was selected. The result was only one of the categories and its points being shown in the new dissolved layer.

Answer 1

Dissolve your adress points with municipality as dissolve_field with option multi_part. It should output a new point feature class with one feature (consisting of lots of points) per municipality. Then use this as index layer with no symbology.

• Chris Medyna: Thank you so much, this did sort them into their respective regions. My ability to insert dynamic text has now been completely removed. Would you know of a way around this to properly set up the DDP?
• Bera: Other than the data in the municipality column. Use spatial join to join data back to the dissolved points.
• Chris Medyna: This did the trick. Very grateful for your help.
• Chris Medyna: Just did, apologies for the delay!

Answer 2

Yes, any vector layer can be used as the index layer, each feature in the layer will then become a page in your data-driven pages (which is why you're getting one page per point in your current setup). In your case, you may want to do a minimum bounding rectangle around each category of points, and use those rectangles as your index layer. With only 20 categories though, it may be faster to just draw the rectangles manually, that will let you specify exactly what you want the extents of your pages to be.

You will need to manually add fields to the index layer's attribute table for DDP elements like page number, orientation, scale, etc.

• Chris Medyna: Your answer is feasible with the exception that a few of these categories do not have all of the address points perfectly clustered in one general area. I'm worried that there may be overlap in that case but I shall give it a try! Once I create all categories I assume there is some way to merge them together or select them into the DDP?