Monday, February 26, 2007

Free Batch Geocoding: Juice Analytics Excel Geocoding Tool

As Meg Stewart stated in the GIS @ Vassar blog, "Geocoding in ArcGIS is not pleasant. Success rates hit a high of about 70 percent, in my experience." We all feel your pain, especially those of us in education where we are constantly put in the position where we need to explain this geocoding unpleasantness at least once per week.

The GIS @ Vassar post points out the fantastic BatchGeocode.com, which makes up a major component of my My Powerful Geospatial Suite of Free GIS.

However, lately I have been directing students to download and use the Juice Analytics: Excel Geocoding Tool. I first learned of this tool via Ogle Earth last year, but for whatever reason, it is only lately that I have really begun appreciating it.

The Excel Geocoding Tool is a downloadable Excel file with super-easy-to-use Macros built into it, so of course you need to enable Macros to use this tool. There are two worksheets. The first worksheet prompts which geocoding service to use (Yahoo! API or geocoder.us). Yeah...who's going to use geocoder.us when compared to Yahoo! Maps API? The second sheet has fields for address, city, state, and zip. Paste tens, hundreds, or thousands (I have never done more than 2,000) of addresses into this sheet, click Geocode All Rows, and voila. At lightening speeds compared to BatchGeocode.com, the lat/long of each address appear in the first two columns. The 500 addresses per geocode limit in BatchGeocode.com is nowhere to be seen with this tool. Another advantage is this Excel tool provides the geocoding precision level for each address, which is truly, truly wonderful. Not nearly as powerful as ArcMap's geocoding score, but for each geocoded address, this tool specifies whether the supplied lat/long is matched for the specific address, street, zip code, or city. Just like BatchGeocode.com, the Excel Geocoding Tool can even create KML files.

I introduced my Intro to GIS class to the Excel Geocoding Tool last week, and as you can imagine, it was a big hit.

16 comments:

Meg said...

Thanks for pointing this out, mapz. I'll give it a try.

Meg

Anonymous said...

This sounds excellent. I tried to follow your link, but the juice analytics webpage seems to be down. Any tips/advice on where I might locate the excel geocoding tool?

mapz said...

Seems like the entire Juice Analytics site is down. I am sure they are down temporarily. In the meanwhile, you can download a copy from here.

mapz said...

Juice Analytics is back online.

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for getting back to me so quickly. I downloaded it this morning, and have been playing with it for a little bit. Works great, and is so quick. I am so happy I came across your blog and this tool!

Shane said...

I was looking at the terms of use for the Yahoo API derived data and it seems that you can't "store" your data. Does this sound right? You can geocode your addresses but you can't keep it? I believe it's section (vii).

Anonymous said...

Freer and Simpler. 100% online. 100% free.

http://www.rentrent.org/EG/

Sly

smirkingman said...

I've developed an addin for Excel which does forward/reverse geocoding and GCD with GoogleMaps. Freeware: http://www.calvert.ch/geodesix/

ivan said...

DIY Geocoding
Geocoding and reverse geocoding created by me. Try it!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing this tool. It's so simple and amazing, much faster than batchgeo and without the new $950 fee!!

Narelle said...

Only works for the USA.
What about the rest of the world?
So I have to go back to batchgeo.com

Max said...

I forked this tool to update it for use with the new Yahoo Placefinder API, as well as work with international addresses:

https://github.com/maxrice/Excel-Geocoding-Tool

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