Easy Online Geocoding

I've been casting about for an easy way to do global address/city geocoding. (This is where you take a written address and get the latitude and longitude so that it can be put on a map.) Although I am a regular user of ArcGIS, the professional mapping software, the geocoding left something to be desired in terms of a) base data for world addresses and b) ease of use. Fortunately, if you can find another program to geocode that will attach the latitude and longitude to your addresses, this is very easy to put into the ArcGIS maps.

Today, I found a very quick and easy solution: http://www.batchgeocode.com/. In their online interface, which draws from google maps, you can simply paste excel format address data into a form and get back a lovely list of addresses with lat/long to paste back into excel. They even give you a quick map of your addresses below. Now, I only did 180 addresses and that took under a minute, but I suspect that thousands of addresses would take longer or not work. Still, for my needs, this is the perfect thing.

Now, say you want to put these back into GIS. Here are some instructions:
First you want to convert that excel data to dbf4 format for compatibility. Remember to set the attributes on the lat/long cells to number with 6 decimal places before doing this. Then you can follow the instructions on http://www.lib.unc.edu/reference/gis/faq/xy.html to turn these XY points into an event theme in your map. Note that the batch code data is in WGS1984 coordinates. Remember also that Longitude is the X field and Latitude is the Y field. (Or you will get some strangely mapped coordinates, as I did until I figured out what I was doing wrong.)

Remarkably, from doing my 180 addresses with just city/country data, I got a 100% match rate from the batch geocode, (after respelling Dusseldorf without the accent marks), and then of course they all mapped just fine once in ArcGIS because it was via lat/long coordinates. I guess this is the benefit of using google maps as the underlying data. I'm so pleased with this, I'm going to make a donation to batch geocode. Keep up the good work!