Available with Business Analyst license.
Overview
Hand-drawn trade areas can be any shape and size and are manually created using the Hand-drawn Area tool. This is helpful when designating an area that doesn't exist in any standard geography such as a proposed multi-acre 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.
Input Prerequisites
Only single polygons can be created 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.
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.
