Hi @Joe-Bouza
When you say wanting to do a buffer analysis with Map, what does that mean? Does it mean you want to analyze which object(s) fall partly in (or entirely in) your buffer? The footings can be squares or rectangles, specifically closed polygons. For the other objects, what are they? Points? Polygons? A combination of both?
If that's correct, then you can do it by creating two shapefiles: one for your buffer and the second for those objects. For example, draw rectangles using REC command to represent footings. Then.....MAPEXPORT those rectangles to shapefile. Next, draw the objects then perform a second MAPEXPORT. Buffer analysis can find where the two feature classes overlap.
Only the objects falling inside the buffer are captured, and when captured, the data will be composed from both the buffER and the buffEE, or the data from the footing buffer and the data from the object. You can analyze which buffer (you might have more than one) contains what objects. You can also look at a captured object(s) and map the location(s) to see which buffer fell it into..
Your image shows 'Create feature from geometry' and that's used to ADD an object, such as a plain vanilla rectangle that you just drew, to an existing building footprint shapefile (also referred to as a feature class). Unfortunately you can't ADD an object to a feature class if a feature class doesn't exist to begin with.
Can you give more details on what you're trying to do?
Chicagolooper
