By A3sthetix, Lifehacker – April 26, 2010 at 01:00PM
Got a spreadsheet full of contacts and addresses you’d like to map out without spending hours manually copying and pasting between your spreadsheet and a mapping application? Reader A3sthetix points us toward BatchGeo, a smart spreadsheet-to-Google-Map conversion tool.
I was faced with the daunting task of mapping over a hundred addresses to a map today. In researching solutions, I came across a Google Maps mashup called BatchGeo, which made the whole task unbelievably simple. All you need to do is paste a table or spreadsheet into the webapp and it does the rest, including validating columns and addresses. The auto-generated map can then be saved for later use.
BatchGeo could also be used for apartment hunters that want to visualize a spreadsheet of potential dwellings. I’m currently using it for creating a store locater and looking at package shipments to correlate common destinations (the long-term goal is to determine where a distribution center might be useful.)
As you can see in the video, the end product even retains information from other columns in your original spreadsheet (like name and telephone number, for example), which is particularly handy.