Challenge

Today our colleague Phil Lowe challenged us and directed us to an amazing feature which enabled us to combine spatial objects. Our challenge was as follows:
“Find the coverage of the stores across each the counties. Each store covers a 15-mile radius.”

Below was my overall solution, which included the use of a few spatial tools to create objects and extract information, but we are only going to be focused on the summarize tool. This challenge was solved more easily by having the total coverage of all stores as one spatial object, as previously they were a bunch of radiuses separated for each store. We are only interested in the total coverage so we can reduce this shape file down to one polygon. Interestingly enough this solution required no spatial tools. This could be done with one tool in one step with summarize.

Below we can see the before summarize and after summarize spatial objects

Solution

To create this combined shape, drop a summarize tool after your collection of overlapping shapes and select the spatial object; then, in the “Add” drop-down, select Spatial->Combine.

Super simple right?