Let’s start by opening a tool from the Catalog pane and running it using its graphical user interface (GUI).
Examine the first required parameter: Input Features. Click the Browse button and browse to the path of your cities dataset C:\PSU\Geog485\Lesson1\us_cities.shp. Notice that once you do this, a name is automatically supplied for the Output Feature Class (and the output path is the same as the input features). The software does this for your convenience only, and you can change the name/path if you want.
A more convenient way to supply the Input Features is to just select the cities map layer from the dropdown menu. This dropdown automatically contains all the layers in your map. However, in this example, we browsed to the path of the data because it’s conceptually similar to how we’ll provide the paths in the command line and scripting environments.
Hover over the Buffer tool entry in this list to see a pop-out window. This window lists the tool parameters, the time of completion, and any problems that occurred when running the tool (see Figure 1.1). These messages can be a big help later when you troubleshoot your Python scripts. The text of these messages is available whether you run the tool from the GUI, from the Python window in Pro, or from scripts.