Tag: BatchGeocode

New map tutorials

A screenshot of using BatchGeocode to take a spreadsheet of addresses and turn it into a nice map. 

Over at Grid Chicago, my other blog that sucks all the time from this blog, I’ve recently written tutorials on how to create online maps, first with Google My Maps (which they renamed to My places) and secondly with BatchGeocode (which renamed itself to BatchGeo because it does more than geocoding now).

Google My Maps is primitive as far as map making goes, but it has the lowest learning curve and it’s easy: you just click on the map where you want something to go and fill in the info window. Read that tutorial.

BatchGeocode is slightly more advanced, but takes your tabular data (most likely from a spreadsheet) and throws it on a map you can embed on your website. They do have pay features. Read the tutorial for BatchGeocode.

I’ve written about BatchGeocode for QGIS, as it was once the only way to do geocoding in QGIS. But now BatchGeocode doesn’t give you a results table that has the latitude and longitude (apparently this is against Google Maps’s terms of service). But I updated the article to talk about using other methods for geocoding in QGIS.

I will be writing two more tutorials, one about GeoCommons and one about Google Fusion Tables.

How to geocode multiple addresses in QGIS

UPDATE April 11, 2013: Updated the directions because the “Add delimited text layer” function moved from the Plugins to Layer menu. 

UPDATE March 24, 2011: I updated the directions to use GPS Visualizer instead of BatchGeocode.com because BG stopped giving geographic coordinates in its output.

Get directions on geocoding a single address in QGIS with a plugin.

QGIS is an open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) application that has been gaining ground since 2004. It runs on all operating systems (it began as a Linux project) and you can download it for free.

I use it often because ESRI doesn’t make the popular ArcGIS software for Mac. That’s unfortunate, but like I said here, software, technology and mapping issues can be easily overcome – we can use QGIS to create maps. QGIS, though, is missing one major feature for basic map building: geocoding.

Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to bring in multiple street addresses and their XY coordinates into your QGIS map en masse: Continue reading