One of the best reasons to use a Geographic Information System (GIS) is to perform geographic computations that help you in your work. Geographic analysis tools can perform a variety of analyses that can unearth geographic patterns in your data. Some examples of geographic analysis tools are:

• Buffer tools can show the areas within a certain distance of a location and estimate their demographics
• Territory tools let you group areas and compute attributes for the completed territory
• Area of influence tools allow you to visualize the straight-line and drive-time catchment areas for a set of locations
• Facility location tools determine the best candidate sites from a set of candidate locations
• Density tools let you visualize point data on a regular grid
• Overlay tools calculate the attributes of map features based on features in another layer
• Weighted center tools find the geographic center of a set of points weighted by some attribute of the points
• Drive-time ring tools determine the area that can be reached within a certain time from one or more locations
• Clustering tools automatically group points or areas into compact clusters
• Routing tools optimize routes for deliveries and pickups