Custom Project Templates in ArcGIS Pro: A Powerful Tool With One Quiet Gotcha
Eric Pimpler
If you find yourself rebuilding the same project structure over and over in ArcGIS Pro — adding the same basemaps, wiring up the same database connections, recreating the same layout, importing the same toolboxes — there is a better way. Custom project templates let you capture a fully configured project once and reuse it as the starting point for every new project after that.
They are one of those features that quietly saves hours of setup time across a team and enforces consistency without anyone having to think about it. But there is also a long-standing behavior tied to how templates handle data sources that can trip you up if you don’t know to watch for it. We’ll cover both: what templates are and how to get the most out of them, and the one issue that has followed this feature across ArcGIS Pro releases and is still present in 3.7.