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.
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I’ve used BatchGeo for exactly the examples given above (locations of events, and dealer locations). I’d be really interested to hear form anyone that’s had joy with anything more specific than postal sector level (e.g. BS1). When I had multiple locations more granular than that it tended to group them on one point (rather than split it out and locate individually.) But for general location planning, it’s top.