The Scenario
A retail site consultant is midway through a site assessment for a new market entry. There are 20 candidate locations in an Excel workbook — each a lat/lng pair. The client wants to know the competitive density around each site before the recommendation gets finalized. Specifically: how many retail competitors are within 500 meters? The final deck needs this column before it goes to the client on Monday.
The bad version:
- Open Google Maps, drop a pin at candidate 1, switch to satellite view, squint at the surrounding 500-meter area, count the retail shops, type the number into the workbook. Repeat 19 more times.
- By candidate 7 you realize you've been eyeballing a 1 km radius, not 500 meters. Go back and recount candidates 1 through 6.
- By candidate 14 you're no longer sure what counts as "retail." The category inconsistency means the numbers aren't comparable across sites.
The analysis is supposed to be the value-add you bring. Right now it's a manual counting exercise with inconsistent definitions.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the coordinate pairs, calls Radar's place search API for each location with a consistent category and radius, and writes the result back — same definition applied to all 20 sites.
Search Radar for places near each of the 20 coordinates in this Excel workbook (lat in A, lng in B) — radius 500m, category retail — and write the top 3 place names and distances to columns C through H
What You Get
- Columns C, E, and G: names of the top 3 nearest retail places for each candidate location
- Columns D, F, and H: distances in meters to each of those places
- Consistent category and radius across all 20 sites — no judgment calls about what counts as a competitor
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need a count of competitors rather than the top 3 names
For each row in this workbook (lat in A, lng in B), search Radar for all places within 500 meters in the retail category and write the total count to column C, the nearest place name to column D, and the distance to the nearest place (meters) to column E
The search radius should vary by site type
For each row in this workbook (lat in A, lng in B, site type in C): search Radar for retail places within 250 meters if site type is "urban", within 500 meters if "suburban" — write the place count to column D and nearest place name to column E
You want to run searches for multiple categories separately
For each of the 20 candidate rows (lat in A, lng in B): search Radar for retail places within 500m and write the count to column C; search for food-beverage places within 500m and write the count to column D
Search, score density, and add a site recommendation tier in one pass
For each of the 20 candidates (lat in A, lng in B): search Radar retail places within 500 meters, write the count to column C and nearest place name to column D, then add a tier in column E: "High Density" if count is 8 or more, "Medium" if 3-7, "Low" if under 3
The tier column gives the client a sortable recommendation filter for the deck.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with candidate location coordinates — ask it to search for nearby Radar places at each point and write the count and nearest results into the workbook. To check geofence coverage instead, see finding geofences near coordinates, or return to the Radar integration overview.