How to Plot Addresses in Google Earth - Free

How to Plot Addresses in Google Earth – Free

I’ve been in business for 3 years, and I’ve kept both a spread sheet and database of the “work orders”. I’ve wanted to map these addresses in Google Earth to get a visual of what I’ve done in areas for research purposes. If you have Google Earth Pro, you can directly input a list of addresses, and it will plot them, but Google Earth Pro is a yearly subscription that I don’t really need.

You can still do it with Regular Google Earth, which will import a KML file.

Here’s how I made a KML file:

Pull up your spreadsheet (or database in a spreadsheet program) , and highlight your address columns (Street address, City, State, Zip), the right-click/copy (to clipboard). If you're like me, you didn't put State as a address field, because you always work in the same state, so you have to add it manually.

Paste into the top box here:

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoder/

Select Yahoo as your geocoding source, because Google does not allow coordinate text output.

Click “Start Geocoding”

You should see the LAT & LONG Start popping up in the lower window.

Now, here’s a tricky part, Right now you have enough to create the KML file, but when you plot it in GE, you’ll see the point marker and the address in the bubble next to it. I, however, wanted the job number to appear next to the node.

So, here’s what I did … Select All (the lat and Long data) and Copy to clipboard on the list of Lats of Longs from the output window. Then open a new blank spreadsheet and paste that data into the spread sheet leaving a blank column to the left. Delete the address fields to the right of the Long. Then go to your jobs spreadsheet and copy the column of job numbers, and paste that into the left most column on the new “temporary” spreadsheet.

One last thing you have to do before creating the KML is to insert a header row into the “temporary” spreadsheet. So highlight first row, do INSERT ROW, then name each column in the new first row “DESC / Latitude / Longitude”

Now, you can copy all 3 columns to the clip board, and paste that data into box on the right side that says “paste your date here”:

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map_input?form=googleearth

Click “Create KML”, and if all went well, it should start a download of the KML file to your computer. Save that file to your HD, and you can open it in Google Earth using File/Open.

BTW, I was able to do all this using my database file (Which is the very old DBIII or DBIV) format but opening the file in Open Office.

Also, there might be a limit to the number of points the free processors on those webpages will process (I think it’s 500) for a single file, But I got around this by breaking my spreadsheet data up by year (2009, 2010, 2011), which is how I wanted it anyway …