 Hey there, Chad Bonser here for High University Libraries. If you're looking to open a restaurant you want to know as much local information as you can about the particular market that you're going to be going into, and this video shows you how to find that information in SimplyMap. So here you go. So you can use SimplyMap as an example here to visually see in this case how many people in by county or percentage by county eat at Applebee's one to two times in the last 30 days. So a good way to kind of compare your market to other markets around you. You can also use SimplyMap to look at comparison reports in this case. Restaurant index, food services index, how much to spend on food services, number of restaurants in an area, who likes to eat out at the particular restaurant or a particular restaurant or times per month comparing to multiple cities. So this video is going to show you how to do that in SimplyMap. When you first get to SimplyMap you're going to be encouraged to create an account. I definitely recommend doing so. Just use your e-mail address and whatever password you want to when you create your account because it allows you to actually save your information for later use because you're going to be doing some pretty complicated searching in here so it's nice to actually save your information for later. When you first log in you may be presented with a screen that looks like this that encourages you to launch the map wizard or do a standard report. I'm actually going to do a report first. So I'm going to click on standard report here and we can do this launch standard report wizard here if we want to. I'm going to click there. It's going to ask us to choose location first. I'll do locations here. I'm going to do cities and in this case I'm going to look for West Virginia and then I'll go in and look for Parkersburg and I will use that one and then do use this location. It's going to ask you for variables next. So I'll click on variables and then we can go down and actually look by different areas here. So for example here is retail sales. So we do go into retail sales and look at 2010 geographies here. Here is food services and if you want that one we just click on it and it actually puts it in there for us there and says congratulations you created a report. Fantastic. But that's not all I want. I want to go back and click on variables here and let's look for things like sales potential and we'll do 2010 geographies here. Here is the restaurant index. If you want to know information about that restaurant index you can click on view metadata and it will tell you what kind of information there. So a higher value indicates more than average dining opportunities near the geography. So we'll close there and then do use this variable and it adds it to our list there. We can go under for example business counts, 2010 geographies here and we're going to look under accommodations and food services here and here is full service restaurants and I want a number of businesses and we will use this variable there. Alright so all kinds of things you can look at there. Now let's say for example you want to find out information about people who eat at a particular type of restaurant. That information is found in the Simmons local information here. So we'll click on Simmons local and there's a section down here for dining and here is a family restaurants and steak houses and there's all kinds of data you can look at in here. I'm actually going to look at things like let's look at family restaurants, number of times visits in the last 30 days if we do that. Click there over on the right hand side we'll get some more information once it loads. So here we have information on where people eat, number of times I've eaten there. Okay so if we're looking at Parkersburg we probably don't want to do Bennigans because I don't believe there's a Bennigans there okay but you can do things like Applebee's. So here is I typically like to do percentages okay percent who have eaten one to two times at Applebee's so we'll use this variable here and the reason I like to do that because we're comparing Parkersburg to Athens to Columbus for example numbers is always going to be larger in the larger cities there so we use the small we'll use the percentages so we get information from a variety of areas there. So we have Applebee's there for example if you want to go down and say let's look for there's Bob Evans let's see use this variable here and that's actually let's do the percentage here so percent dining three or four times in the last 30 days we'll use that variable there just to kind of give you an idea as far as what we're looking at then we can close that and here we have it'll load our data for us here so we got a restaurant index the numbers amount spent on food services comparing Parkersburg, Virginia to the U.S. as a whole so let's say for example we want to look at other cities by comparison so let's say for example you're going to start a new restaurant in Parkersburg and happen to know there is the same restaurant in Columbus and Athens you're going to start or the same kind of restaurant so what you can do is to compare those two areas is going to locations again and this time we'll do cities we'll do select the state and we will do Ohio and this case once it loads we can choose just search by Athens use this location and we can go in and again Columbus grab Columbus there use this location and then what we'll have here is it'll actually give us a list comparing Parkersburg to Athens to Columbus to the U.S. once it loads here if you want to go under actions here download the table as a CSV or Excel file if you want to to manipulate it that way so there's all kinds of great data to be had here when looking at a local market lots of information here and this is just the tip of the iceberg to kind of show you how this kind of thing works here if you like you can't find what you're looking for in browsing you can actually go under search and search for variables by keyword there give you more information that you can look for that way likewise if you wanted to draw a map of your area for restaurant information or things like that you can once again go and launch your map wizard we can click on variables here we can actually go in and choose our variables here if you want to actually you can actually close out of this and since we've already used some variables if we click on recent here and we go in and say let's look at percent who have eaten at a Bob Evans three or four times in 2010 excuse me in the last 30 days excuse me so we'll use this variable here and what this is going to give us if we close this out it's actually going to center on Harlan Iowa there so what we can actually do is actually change locations and let's go in and we can look at let's look at cities again and let's look at West Virginia and then we will load Parkersburg and it will go in and actually center on Parkersburg West Virginia for us now it may get a little bit close for us so what we can actually do is zoom out if you want to right now we are zoomed in on census tracks within Parkersburg West Virginia so a good way to kind of figure out where you might want to select choose a restaurant based upon the percentage of people who have eaten in a particular location in the in the last 30 days there if you zoom out you can actually get county level data and zoom further out you get city and state data as well if you don't know your southeast Ohio and West Virginia geography very well you want to go up in display options you can actually tell it to label zip codes or in this case we're looking at zip codes let's change this to actually counties that would be better to look at once it refreshes there now you can go under display options and label counties and that gives you an idea so here we are comparing Wood County which is in West Virginia where Parkersburg is to Athens to Mags things like that and we can zoom out further if we want to get more information that way this map can actually be saved you want to as a PDF or GIF image you can also go down and edit the legend if you don't like this particular color you can change the information that way so that's a quick overview of how to use simply map a little bit long video my apologies there but it's pretty complicated database at times but really good information if you're looking to analyze a local market for in this case looking at setting up a restaurant hope for this video helped you with your research if you need more help look for the contact link on the business blog be glad to help you any way I can take care and best luck with your research