SP&GM: Step One – Generate Lat/Long codes

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Using one of the Internet available sites generate a Lat/Long pair for each address that you have. In my case I had an Excel file with the addresses which I Cut & Pasted on to a site that generated the Lat/Long pairs. I used Batch Conversions of Address to Latitude/Longitude (Forward Geocoding) by Stephen P. Morse, but there are plenty around. I then took the resultant Lat/Long pairs and inserted them in to my Excel spreadsheet

I ended up with an Excel spreadsheet that looked something like this;

but with another 170 or so entries.

By going through this process, of generating the Lat/Long pairs, you can verify that the location information you’re using is accurate and that you get a good Lat/Long address. I found that in some cases the address I was using wasn’t entirely accurate. If the Address conversion cannot resolve the address it usually returns a 0,0. You can then investigate why. I found that in my case most of these were as a result of me using something like an ‘E’ in the address instead of ‘East’ etc.

Once you have the Excel spreadsheet save it for use in the next step.

 

Please note! that the example JavaScript that I provide in the post; SP&GM: Sample JavaScript, requires the Excel columns to be in the order shown in the picture above. In hindsight I didn’t really need the ‘Location’ column, that was a hold over from when I was using the Google Maps Geocode functionality.

 

Previous post in series: Plotting SharePoint List Data on a Google Map – Part 2

Next post in series: SP&GM: Step Two – Create your SharePoint List