Recently I had to do a series of field checks scattered throughout the city. There are several ways one could tackle this task in order to create a table of all the locations and find a good route. There are mobile apps, various websites, utilizing google maps (10 location limit) or using tools within ArcMap. I could have also utilized our own address database, or our customer database, selected all 20 entries and gone from there. However, I thought this would be a great opportunity to test out Google’s new fusion tables/mapping feature.
Here are the steps, which are not as straight forward as one may think:
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Create the fusion table with a location field and a name field, with Name being a text field, and it must be the first column to enable labelling in Google Earth
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Geocode the table by clicking on the map tab. You will get better results if you have added a city/zip to the address field.
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While in the map tab, export the map.
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Open the file Google Earth and change the scale of the text to whatever you want, greater than 0 so you can see it.
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And if you want to open this set of points in ArcMap - Save Place As…kmz
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In ArcMap, Conversion Tools/KML to Layer then select your kmz
There you have it, a quick way to geocode a series of points using Google!