ArcGIS Pro reintroduces the concept of projects to Esri users. Esri first introduced the concept of managing your GIS using project files with its ArcView GIS application. ArcView GIS used projects to manage map layouts, views, tables, data connections, and more within a single APR file. This allowed you to access everything associated with a project from a single location.

When Esri released ArcGIS in 1999, this was dropped. In its place, Esri decided to use separate individual files. You have map documents (MXD files) for ArcMap, which contain a single map with one or more data frames. So, for each map you needed, you would have to create a separate map document. You have scenes (SXD files) for ArcScene, which contained one local 3D view. All of this means you often have tens to hundreds of files to manage and keep track of which makes management much harder.

ArcGIS Pro projects greatly simplify GIS management. Projects allow you to...