Viewing selections as independent layers

- Now that we know several ways that we can create selections, it's time to explore what we can do with our selected data. The typical way that we save a selection is to copy it to a new layer. Now, I still have the selection that we made in the last movie. It includes all the transportation features that happen within King County. In order to export this as it's own layer, what I can do is right-click on the transportation layer here, and choose Selection, and then Create Layer From Selected Features. This will add a new selection feature up here to the top of my layer stack. Now I can go ahead and turn off the transportation layer here, and go ahead and choose to deselect all of my features here.

Now if we zoom into King County, I can see just the roads that intersect with that particular area. At this point, it's probably a good idea to rename the layer. Instead of Washington Transportation selection, I'll click on it, pause, and then click again, and I'll change it to King County Transportation. When creating new data layers in this fashion, it's important to note that we're not actually saving new data files to our disk. We're simply creating a small instruction set on how to pull out the features from the larger original data set. The original data set remains unchanged. Now, if we wanted to export this sub-selection of transportation roads within King County to it's own data set, what I could do is right-click on the layer here, and go down to Data, and then Export Data.

This will allow me to export just this data set to it's own feature class. Let's go ahead and say cancel. Once our features have been parsed out through the various selection methods, creating a new layer from the data allows you to stylize or present the features in unique ways. Creating data layers from a selection is also an easy way to filter out overly complex data sets in order to clarify the message of our maps.