Props to ArcMap

I just finished making a map of Tanacetum vulgare (Common Tansey) incidence for a visiting ecologist. I learned to do this kind of task with ArcView 3 back in the previous century, but left the data processing and analysis business before my employer upgraded. This means I never really tried out ArcMap until now. I must say that it's perfectly adequate for this kind of task, allowing me to add a new attribute to features and hack away at the attribute table using search and replace. A scriptable interface to the symbolization would be nice, but the provided tools are not too bad. Everything I remembered about good ole ArcView 3.2 seemed to transfer right over to use of ArcMap 9.1. The whole thing, not including the time to find and download decent data (North American Framework from GeoGratis) took about 20 minutes. There's no greater message to this story, I just feel that I owe the blogosphere a report of a good experience I've had with proprietary GIS software.