Plot Your Trip on a Map – Tutorial

Friday, December 7, 2012

Saturday I leave on a trip to NYC with my mom and sister. Girls trip, woohoo!! There are so many things to see, do, and especially eat in NYC, that it is somewhat hard to narrow things down. We needed a way to strategize where we would go when. In order to cover our ground effectively, I wanted to map out some of our destinations in one spot. Now, there may be way more effective ways of doing this, but it took me a couple hours to figure this out. I thought I’d at least share how I did it.

batchgeo.com is the little wizard that brings all our locations into one map to view. Once you input your data, it runs through everything and plots it on the map. When I bring my cursor close to one of the markers it tells me the location. Then, if I click on it, the details I have saved come up. So handy! You can also save and edit your map for later.

nyc map

When you first visit batchgeo.com, it prompts you to input your locations by inputting the data in spreadsheet format. The key here is that I needed all three of us to be able to input our desired locations without me having to keep track of everything. Here is where drive.google.com comes in. I needed a document I could share.

google

In google drive, I clicked on create then spreadsheet. And, here’s a screen shot of what we have so far.

image

I laid out the spreadsheet based on the format batchgeo.com shows including the column headings. I think you can include several more columns if you want more data stored in you map (i.e. phone numbers, business hours, etc.) Here’s a closer view.

nyc image

Once I shared the the spreadsheet with my mom and sister, they were able to add in their own places of interest. Now we will be able to see which locations are close to each other on one map.

Once the spreadsheet is ready, I simply highlight the data and copy (ctrl+c) then paste (ctrl+v) in the designated area at batchgeo.com. Then it generates the map you see above.

So any recommendations for NYC that I need to make sure get on my list?

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