The Scenario
You're the GIS analyst for a retail chain. The store-locator map was rebuilt six months ago. The data powering it was last touched before the last branch consolidation. You now have an Excel workbook with 300 branch addresses — plain text, collected from three different regional managers who each have their own formatting conventions — and you need every one of them converted to a standardised LINZ-verified address with lat/lng coordinates before the dev team can import the new dataset.
The dev team's import window is Tuesday. You have the workbook now.
The bad version:
- Manually call the Addressfinder NZ API for each address in Postman or a script.
- Realise the addresses have mixed casing, extra whitespace, and several rows where the suburb is in the street field.
- Fix the obvious ones by hand, re-run the API, collect coordinates and LINZ IDs into a separate CSV.
- Spend an hour joining the original workbook to the output CSV so the coordinates align with the right row.
The dev import slot is booked for 2 PM Tuesday. There's no time in that schedule for a three-round data cleaning loop.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the worksheet, understands the address structure, and through its built-in Addressfinder NZ integration it can verify every address against the LINZ database and write coordinates and identifiers back to the correct columns — without any manual API calls.
For each address in column A, verify it against the Addressfinder NZ database and populate columns B and C with latitude and longitude, and column D with the LINZ address identifier
What You Get
- Column B: GPS latitude (decimal degrees, NZTM2000 datum)
- Column C: GPS longitude (decimal degrees)
- Column D: LINZ address identifier for the matched address
- Rows that cannot be matched against the LINZ database are flagged UNMATCHED in column D so you can review them before the dev import
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The suburb is in the street field for some rows
Verify addresses in column A against Addressfinder NZ — where the suburb appears to be embedded in the street field, parse and correct it before running verification, then write the standardised address, lat, lng, and LINZ ID to columns B, C, D, and E
You also need the postcode and city as separate columns
Use Addressfinder NZ verification on the addresses in column A and write the standardised address, suburb, postcode, and city into separate columns B, C, D, and E
Some rows have old branch names instead of street addresses
For rows in column A that appear to be branch names rather than street addresses, search the Addressfinder NZ POI index to find the matching address, then verify it and write the lat, lng, and LINZ ID to columns B, C, and D
Normalise, verify, enrich, and flag low-confidence matches in one go
Normalise casing and strip extra whitespace from column A, verify each address against Addressfinder NZ, write standardised address, lat, lng, and LINZ ID to columns B, C, D, and E, flag any row with a match confidence below 85% as REVIEW in column F, and add a count of matched vs unmatched rows at the bottom of the sheet
One prompt handles the normalisation, verification, enrichment, and quality flag — ready for the Tuesday import.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your branch address workbook, then ask it to run an Addressfinder NZ verification pass and write back the LINZ identifiers and coordinates. For reverse-geocoding coordinates into NZ addresses, see reverse-geocoding GPS coordinates, or return to the hub overview.