circlepointqgis
I have a site and want to draw an indicative line in a 5km buffer around the centre of the site. So I want to draw a circle with a radius of 5km. I have a tool for drawing circles and ellipses and rectangles squares and spirals.
None of these let me state the centre point and the radius.
Circles in Openlayers
http://geographika.co.uk/samples/geodesic/
http://geographika.co.uk/creating-a-geodesic-circle-in-openlayers you will need your data in json - Google Spreadsheets can do this
http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/feed/key/worksheet/public/basic?alt=json-in-script&callback=myFunc
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/samples/spreadsheet_sample.html
You can use the Shape Digitizing Toolbar's "Add Circle by a Centre Point and Another Point" tool combined with the Advanced Digitizing tool's distance option.
But to be honest I don't find buffering to be long winded at all and I usually go with that method.
Best Answer
As commented by @Roy:
i.e. you could make a point in layer and then buffer it into a new layer.
The workflow I have recently been using is to create the point in a Memory Layer, create the buffer into a shapefile saved in a temporary location, then copy and paste the polygon into the final layer. A bit long but works OK.