Creating a Square Buffer

Problem: You are asked to create a square buffer for your project area.

Solution:
1. Create a point shapefile where you want the center of your square buffer to be.

2. Create a normal buffer with the desired radius. Geoprocessing-> Buffer.

3. Navigate to Minimum Boundary Geometry Tool 

4. Fill out with your normal buffer as the input feature and choose Rectangle by Width for a rectangle buffer. This buffer will be the same radius as your normal buffer. 

5. The result: 

Utilizing Placement Properties for Labels

Problem: Your label for your shapefile is on top of your data. There are two ways to correct this, Placement Properties or Maplex Label Engine. This blog post will discuss Placement Properties. I will discuss Maplex Label Engine in a later post.

Solution: 

1. In the Layer Properties dialog box, navigate to the Labels tab. 

2. Click on Placement Properties 

3. Change Label Weight and Feature Weight to both Medium. 

4. Click OK and OK and your label should now be off to the side of the data.