arcgis desktop - Calculate nearest distance in ArcView, XY coordinates

I am really lost and struggling because I have never used an Arc system before.

I have two datasets. One with house locations, and the other with investment locations- each locating by XY coordinate.

The room where I conduct my analysis only has ArcView, so I must use that.

I want to calculate the distance between a house and the nearest investment (calculate the distance between two XY coordinates).

Is this possible with ArcView?

I also want to join the variables in the investment dataset to the housing dataset, after I have calculated the nearest distance. Is that possible?

I am sorry if I am not explaining myself correctly- I am just very confused, if it's not stata, then I don't know how to use it!

Answer

You can do this a couple of ways (manually or with a script or model). You will likely end up using the Point Distance Tool which will identify the closest investment location to each point in a table and that table can then be joined back to the house location layer with a tabular join. Point Distance is in the toolbox under "Analysis Tools" -> "Proximity".

Editing the table: This is going to give you every distance from every house to every location so you can open this in Excel and filter out what you need or just edit the table to include just the shortest distance for every "FID". There are a few ways to go about this. You could just select the shortest distance for each FID and then export the table.

If you have too many features to make this doable (even with Excel) then you would need to figure out a script or model to select just the records with the shortest distance.

Use the house locations as input features and the investment locations as near features. Look at the table after this runs. You may need to manipulate the table a little bit to get it into the form that you want but you can join this back to your original house location layer by some unique id from that layer.

You can right click the house locations layer and choose "Joins and Relates" -> "Join...". Make sure "Join attributes from a table is selected at the very top. Then choose the field that the join will be based on in the house locations. Choose your table from the Point Distance tool in the 2nd option and the field that matches.