Country of GPS Point?

[Matthew]

Hello, is Alteryx capable of telling me which country a GPS point is in?

I have drawn a line between US and Canada, and i need to be able to return the length of each portion of the line on each side of the border

I solved this by drawing a polygon around Canada, and getting the intersect information between the line and the polygon

The problem is my polygon is extremely vague around the ocean borders, so my solution doesnt work if the line goes over an ocean (like if i drew a line between Canada and Australia)...

Does anyone know how i can improve the accuracy of this polygon, or if alteryx has some automatic way of telling me which country a GPS point is in?

[JosephSerpis · Accepted solution]

You would need to get a shapefile or any geographic file of the various countries you be interested. A google of the various countries you are interested should suffice.   

[Matthew]

ah thank you "shapefile" is the term i needed, i found a few that look promising

is there any way i can import a shape file into alteryx?

[JosephSerpis]

Yes the Input tools can handle shapefiles.

[Matthew]

i found this .shp file (attached) on the canadian government's website, but alteryx can't seem to read it... do you know what might be wrong?

[JosephSerpis]

No I can't I unzipped the file and was able to Import into Alteryx with no issues.

[Matthew]

ah got it working, my error was that the shape file needs to remain in the same folder as all the accompanying files (i was only extracting the one data file at first). thanks for all the help