I'd like to give you a brief introduction to how arctoolbox works and I'll use a couple of tools to show you. That'll be the buffer and intersite tools. So the first thing we have to do is open the arctoolbox pane. You just click on this button here. That opens the pane, and you'll see that there's a whole list of toolboxes, which essentially you can think of as folders. And within each of those there are sub-folders, or if you want to think of them as sub-toolboxes, that are designed to perform different functions. So just sort of as an overview, the whole idea that Esri has come up with is that every tool has one little specific purpose. It answers one particular question on one data set, usually. And so they've organized these tools, there's hundreds of them, inside ArcGIS, and they've organized these tools into these folders which are our toolboxes. And then you have toolboxes inside toolboxes, so that you can see that, for example here, we have a folder for Analysis Tools. Within that, we have ones for Extract, Overlay, proximity and statistics. And so, if we go into Proximity, you'll see that there's a whole set of tools, and you can tell which ones are actual tools, because they have this little hammer symbol. Some of them have a little scroll or parchment, if you want to think of it, which is a script, which is just another type of tool for now. You can think of it that way. And so if we want to execute a tool, if we want to use it, we just double-click on it. And that opens the dialog box for that tool. And just very generally speaking, you can sort of typically think of this as, again this is generally, if you have an input, feature class. You have some settings or parameters, as we often call them that tell the tool how you want it to work, and then you have an output. There's lots of variations on this, but that's generally the idea. You're telling it what feature classes you want it to work on, how you want it to work with the settings, parameters, and what the output should be. Okay, so in this particular case, as my input features, I am going to use as my first input the Library feature class. And so here we have an input feature class. It's automatically named it Library_Buffer1. That's fine, I'll leave it like that. The linear unit that I'm going to use here I'm going to set that to be 500 meters. And I'm going to dissolve the boundaries of the buffer that will result, okay? So we have our input, our output. And this would be a good example of a parameter. So this would be telling that this particular tool, which is all about distance and creating new buffers, what that distance should be, so I'm going to set it to be 500 meters. Now, often when you see a toolbox, there may be other options available. I'm just starting with the most basic version of a buffer. There's other ones here. For example, you could buffer by Field, there's Side Type, End Type, things like that. I'm not going to go through all of these now. The main idea is that you should get used to these. You should get used to how they work. And one, actually another, really important tip is to make sure that you use the tool help. So, if you open a dialog box and you don't see that little side pane, you can just click on the thing here that says Show Help, and I use this all the time, okay? There's so many tools in here, you can't always keep track of what each tool does. And so if you just click on the dialog box itself, it will give you an overview. So, in this case, this tool, it says, creates buffer polygons around input features to a specified distance, and it gives you a little diagram here of how that works. That's great. So, now I understand what it does. If I click on any one of the parameters in here, for example, the input features. And it tells me, the input features can be point, line, or polygon features to be buffered. And then, you have the output, it tells you something else, the linear unit. So, you really have to get in the habit of looking at these things. What does this tool do, why would I use it, what's the result, what should I expect? And you'll get a lot of that just from that little pane. If you find that you actually want even more information, you can click on the button down here that says tool help, and that will open a separate window with ARC GIS documentation that provides even more information, so you can dig deeper if you need to. Again, I highly recommend that you get used to doing this. There's so many tools in here, and so many things, variations on them, and what parameter does what. That you just have to get used to being able to open these up, skim through them, get the information you need, and get back to work. So, for example here, it shows us whether we dissolve or we don't dissolve our buffers. So in our case, what I was doing was I chose the dissolve all, as you'll see in the result in a minute. And if I scroll down, you see there's lots of information here about each of those parameters and what they do, examples of what would happen if you use this setting and so on. So again, I will not go through of it, but I really encourage you to have a look at them, okay. So without further ado, if I actually apply this tool and I say OK, it will run the tool. And you'll notice that, down here in the bottom, that was quick, it's probably already gone. There was a little running ticker that said that that tool was being run, so this was a pretty quick one. So sometimes, that may be down there for awhile, depending on the size of the data set and the complexity of the tool. It might take a few seconds or a few minutes. So that was just indicating that the tool was running, now it's been completed. So you can see that the result of my buffer tool has been added to our map. So we have a buffer, so that's what these blue areas are. And what this is indicating is that distance is 500 meters away from each library. So if we have any area that's inside this light blue, that means that that area is within 500 meters of the feature class that I indicated. So here this is just a perfect circle, because it's going right around that one point. And what's happened here is that it dissolved those boundaries, so we would have had two separate buffer circles, one for there, one for there. But because I chose the dissolve feature or parameter, it's turned it into what it's dissolved the boundary between them. Great. So now we have our buffer for our libraries, and now I'm going to do the same thing for the schools. So I will open the buffer tool again. I will select the school feature class. I'm going to accept that feature class name, I'm going to use 500 meters again for this one, and I'm going to dissolve these as well and say OK. And now it's complete. The green areas indicate areas that are within 500 meters of any school in this data set. So that's an example of the buffer tool being applied to two different feature classes. What I want to show you next is well, what if we want to find out the areas, or identify the areas, that are within 500 meters of both a school and a library, how can we do that? And I'm going to use the intersect tool to identify those areas. So, what I've done here is, I've just made the buffers for the libraries and the schools hollow so it's easier to see the overlap between the two. And conceptually or what we're going to do with the intersection is identify areas that are overlapping between these two sets of buffers, okay? And you can literally think of this as kind of a geographic version of a Venn diagram. You're looking at the intersection of one set of polygons with another set of polygons. In this case, they're both generated by the buffer tool, but they could be any kind of polygons. Okay, so now I am going to use an overlay tool, which will be the intersect tool. And just a little tip for you, if you are not sure which tool blocks a tool is in, you can use the search tab over here. And if you know the name of the tool, as I do here, so if I say intersect, I can search for that tool, and so there's the result there. And so I can either open that tool by clicking on that, or I can open the toolbox by clicking on that, and it will tell me where that is. So just a different way of accessing the same tools, just if you're not sure where something is. Okay, since I do know where it is, I'm going to open the tool over here. So here's my intersect tool. I'm going to set my inputs as the two buffers, so the school buffer and my second input for this is going to be my library buffer. So I'm going to get an intersection of those two. It's given me an automatic feature class name. They're not always the best, sometimes you do want to customize it with your own names, just so you can make sure you know what, you can keep track of things. In this case it's fine, I'll leave it. And I'm going to accept the other parameters as the defaults, that's fine. You can see over here, the explanation of what the intersect tool does. And I'm going to click OK. And here's our result, so the areas in green, let me just change the color of that so it's a little easier to see. Let's go with something that's easy to recognize. So these areas that are in red now are the intersections of those two sets of buffers. And so that answers my question. If I'm trying to identify areas that are within 500 meters of both a school and a library, then that has to be the areas that intersect both of those buffers. So, that's the result that I get. So that's just a quick overview of the arctoolbox pane, finding tools, opening tools. Going through the dialog box, looking at the help, filling in the parameters, and then executing them. As well as trying to give you a quick demo of how the buffer tool works and the intersect tool works. There's tons of tools in here, I do encourage you to explore a lot of them. Don't be afraid to just open them, try them, run them, see what you get. Just find a data set that you can work with as sort of a tester, and play with it. So, have fun!
