How to create a map from a list of addresses

If you have a list of postcodes that you’d like to see on a map, but don’t want to plot them all out individually, there are tools that can do it for you without programming knowledge.

I’ve tried a few of these and they used to be clunky, but Batchgeo is a very fast and accurate tool which just requires the skills to paste from a spreadsheet. Although it prefers as much information as possible, I’ve tried it with some addresses without postcodes and it found these too.

I’m grateful to David Foord who included Batchgeo in a tutorial on exporting a spreadsheet of addresses to Google maps.

And if you’re wondering why you would possibly want to do such a thing, Batchgeo has a handy list of reasons for everyone from the business-owner who wants to create a ‘branch finder’ map to the paper boy who needs a route map.

As usual, be cautious about uploading any personally identifiable information onto the public web.

This short video shows a really quick city map being created from information on Wikipedia.