The Bob Youngblood account makes a good starting place. He asked if there were maps of Germany, Austria and Switzerland that showed the internal subunits --states, etc. I found that ESRI had supplied just such a resource with "ESRI Data and Maps", 4 CDs containing various base maps and assorted data for, among other things, European countries.

I've made folders on my D: drive to contain the data for those three countries (d:\esri\deutsch, d:\esri\aust, d:\esri\switz), and they will probably be copied to Miley before long. These instructions are meant to be generic, but do generally assume that the data have been copied from the CD. The instructions below cover the basics of using existing data, and another page covers adding variables to existing data.

Start ArcView, which will bring up this screen:

Click on New to open a View, and then on the + icon (just below Edit on the menubar) to Add a Theme.

Navigate to where the ArcView data are stored (e.g., d:\esri\aust for Austrian data) and open the folder to see a list of .shp files ("shape files"):

Shape files usually have reasonably obvious names. Shift-click to select any combination and they will appear on the left side of the View screen:

Now click in one of the checkboxes to display that shapefile (in this case, I've clicked "Autstate.shp"):

The resulting map of states in salmon doesn't please me. To change it to plain old black-and-white I double-click the salmon rectangle and the Legend Editor opens:

another double-click of the salmon rectangle permits me to edit the symbol --here I've chosen to outline the states, which I accomplish by clicking Apply:

Now I double-click the rectangle again, and once again see the Legend Editor, and choose "Graduated Color" from the Legend Type scrollbox:

This allows me to explore the data available for these Austrian states by looking in the Classification field:

If I select one of the variables (say "Gbirthrate") I'll see a distribution with (default) 5 levels

and clicking Apply maps that distribution for the component states:

I could change the number of intervals or the display colors via the Legend Editor.

I could also examine the data which lie behind the map by clicking on the Theme Table icon (fifth from the left --or choose 'Theme' from the 'Table' entry on the menubar):

To see a different variable you might choose to uncheck Autstate.shp, click Aut_cnty.shp, change the color of Aut_cnty.shp to simple outline, and also click Aut_city.shp. Here's the result:

(note that Aut_city.shp is selected --so double-clicking on it would produce the Legend Editor for Aut_city.shp. No data are associated with the cities, so at this point all we can see is their locations). The icon in the second row at the far lest (i for information) allows you to position crosshairs over an entity (like a city symbol) and click once to see what data are available, in this case for the city of Zwettl .

In the next example I've chosen Aut_cnty.shp and selected Gbirthrate:

and the resulting map looks like this:

Note that the cities don't appear, though they are checked, but I can bring them into view by click-dragging their Aut_city.shp box above the Aut_cnty.shp box:

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Another page covers adding variables to existing data, and there's another on adding point data. There's also one on dealing with ArcINFO .e00 files.