Scribd
Upload
48 views

Spatial: Buffer Tool

The document discusses spatial analysis tools in Alteryx that allow users to perform spatial data manipulation and processing. It highlights tools like the Buffer tool, Create Points tool, Distance tool, Find Nearest tool, and others. It then provides an example of using the Distance tool to calculate distances between customer locations and stores, and the Find Nearest tool to identify the closest store to each customer.

Uploaded by

Subhrangsu Adhikari
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
48 views

Spatial: Buffer Tool

The document discusses spatial analysis tools in Alteryx that allow users to perform spatial data manipulation and processing. It highlights tools like the Buffer tool, Create Points tool, Distance tool, Find Nearest tool, and others. It then provides an example of using the Distance tool to calculate distances between customer locations and stores, and the Find Nearest tool to identify the closest store to each customer.

Uploaded by

Subhrangsu Adhikari
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 5

Spatial

The Spatial category includes tools that offer spatial data manipulation, processing, and
object editing.

Buffer Tool: The Buffer tool takes any polygon or polyline spatial object and
expands or contracts its extents by the user specified value.

Create Points Tool: The Create Points tool creates a point-type spatial object by
specifying input fields containing the X coordinate (Longitude ) and the Y coordinate
(Latitude ).

Distance Tool: The Distance tool calculates the ellipsoidal direct point-to-point,
point-to-edge, or the drive distance between two sets of spatial objects.

Find Nearest Tool: The Find Nearest Points tool identifies the shortest distance
between points or polygons in one file and the points, polygons, or lines in a second file.

Generalize Tool: The Generalize tool decreases the number of nodes that make
up a polygon or polyline, making a simpler rendition of the original spatial object.

Heat Map Tool: The Heat Map tool generates polygons representing different
levels of "heat" (e.g. demand) in a given area, based on individual records (e.g.
customers).

Make Grid Tool: The Make Grid tool takes a spatial object and creates a grid. The
resulting grid is either a single grid, bound to the extent of the input spatial objects, or
individual grids that dissect each input polygon.

Non Overlapping Drivetime Tool: The Non Overlapping Drivetime tool creates
drivetime trade areas, that do not overlap, for a point file.
Poly-Build Tool: The PolyBuild tool takes a group of spatial point objects and
draws a polygon or polyline in a specific order to represent that group of points.

Poly-Split Tool: The PolySplit tool takes polygon or polyline objects and splits
them into their component point, line, or region objects.

Smooth Tool: The Smooth tool takes a polygon or polyline object and adds nodes
to smooth sharp angles into curves along the lines that make up the object.

Spatial Info Tool: The Spatial Info tool extracts tabular information about the
spatial object. Attributes such as: area, spatial object, number of parts, number of
points, and centroid Latitude/Longitude coordinates can be appended.

Spatial Match Tool: The Spatial Match tool establishes the spatial relationship
(contains, intersects, touches, etc) between two sets of spatial objects. The tool accepts
a set of spatial objects from the Left Input (Targets) and a set of spatial objects from the
Right Input (Universe ).

Spatial Process Tool: The Spatial Process tool performs high-level spatial object
editing from a simple, single tool. You can combine multiple objects or cut the spatial
objects of the input table.

Trade Area Tool: The Trade Area tool creates regions around specified point
objects in the input file. Trade Areas are created one of two ways: either by defining a
radius around a point, or by a drivetime.

Spatial Analytics on Alteryx


by Aj Basnet | Jun 30, 2017
Alteryx uses the spatial object which can be used for spatial analytics. It does this by generating geo
points using longitude and latitude from the data set. These points can be combined to make a
polyline and polygons. This data can be used to get insight into how location factors into other
aspects of business operations. In this blog, I highlight few of the tools to get you start spatial
analyzing in Alteryx.
The spatial tool used in this sample data are:

Create
Points Distance
Find Nearest

Distance tool
In essence, this tool is used to calculate the distance between two geo points, a line or polygon. It
can also be used to calculate drive time
The Alteryx workflow below shows how the Distance Tool can be used. In this example, I am trying
to calculate the distance customers travel to a certain store. Since my data for customer location and
store location are in different files, I had to perform a join. However, before I do this I used
the Create Point tool to produce a geo points from the longitude and latitude.
Here are the results. The next step to this analysis I can look at is: are the customers going to the
closest store from their location or are there other stores which are closer to them. To perform this
task, Finding Nearest tool has to be utilized.
Also, do note in this example I am using the physical distance (not road distance).

Find Nearest
Find Nearest tool is used to find the closest points and/or polygons in different sets of data. The
workflow below shows how this tool can be utilized. Unlike the Distance tool, this has two inputs, one
is Target ‘T’ and Universe ‘U’, in the target section I have joined the location of the store and in the
Universe input, I joined the location of the customers.
This tool produces two outputs ‘M’ – gives all the matched data whereas ‘U’ shows the unmatched.

The result section below shows the closest store to each of the customers. If the customers are
already going to their closest store then this can be filtered out.
These fields tool can be effective for further advanced mapping analytics.

You might also like