Chris Garrard

Programmer/Analyst II

After earning degrees in statistics and biology, Chris decided to become a programmer and has worked in that capacity at the RS/GIS Lab since 2002. She gets to create fun things such as distributed analysis apps that run on AWS, web apps using both Open Source and Esri technologies, stand-alone analysis software, and ArcGIS extensions. She also wears DBA and sysadmin hats from time to time.

In addition, she teaches a yearly class on Python programming for GIS that focuses on ArcPy and GDAL/OGR, and has written a book on Python programming with Open Source software, called Geoprocessing with Python.

Last year I created some interactive control flow examples for the Python class I teach. In preparation for this year, I cleaned them up a bit and published them at https://usu-python.gitlab.io/control-flow/. I hope they’re useful for someone!

Today someone asked me for help with exporting data from ArcGIS to a csv file, but with different column names. He had found solutions online that involved exporting to Excel, changing the column names there, and then exporting to a csv, but there’s a much simpler way to do it. In fact, here’s a function …