Hand-drawn areas

Overview

Hand-drawn trade areas allow you to create custom trade areas of any shape or size. This is helpful when designating an area that doesn't exist in any standard geography such as a proposed multiacre commercial development. There are benefits to creating custom boundaries using the Hand-drawn Area tool and not simply converting a graphic polygon or creating a new feature class. Using this tool allows you to input special fields used in Business Analyst reports. Also, these trade areas are automatically saved to the Business Analyst Repository for quick retrieval.

The Hand-drawn Area wizard will automatically open the Polygon tool on the ArcMap Draw toolbar so you can create a new polygon of any shape.

You can only create single polygons using the Hand-drawn Area tool. Multipart polygons are not supported using this function. To create multipart polygons, you can use the Study Area wizard to select multiple graphic polygons, or use the ArcGIS Editing toolbar to create a new feature class.

Hand-drawn areas allow you to input special fields used in Business Analyst reports, such as Store ID and Name.

Example Output

In the example below, a hand-drawn area has been created around a downtown area. This boundary doesn't need to follow any existing polygon.