The Data Preparation Menu is where you prepare data for subsequent change detection analysis. The primary place for this is the Survey Library, which is a repository for all your surveys, their associated surfaces and the place where you estimate their error/uncertainty surfaces. You can not populate the  Survey Library unless you are in an active project. By contrast, there are other data preparation tools that may have utility beyond just preparing data for change detection and those can be accessed while not in an active project (e.g. Create Bounding Polygon Tool).


Those of you who might have experimented on earlier Beta releases of GCD 5, will have noticed that the Data Preparation Menu has changed and no longer includes the Point Cloud to DEM tool or the Create Concurrent Grids tool. We had reliability issues with both of these tools and were unable to complete improvements to them prior to release so held them back until they can be more robustly tested and refined.