The Scenario
You're three hours into building a mapping dashboard for 2,000 store locations. The data landed in your Excel workbook this morning — street addresses in column A, columns B and C completely empty. The dashboard tool needs lat/lng. The geodata is the blocker.
The bad version:
- Open Google Maps in a browser, paste the first address, read the coordinates from the URL or the info panel, type them into cells B2 and C2
- Repeat for address 2, address 3, address 4 — watch the afternoon evaporate one row at a time
- Get to row 80 and realize you've been copying the wrong coordinate order (lat vs lng swapped) for the last twenty rows, and now you have to go back
You're a field ops coordinator, not a data entry contractor. This isn't what the dashboard project was supposed to cost.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that runs inside your Excel workbook and talks to Google Maps on your behalf. Open the SheetXAI sidebar, paste your prompt, and it geocodes every row in one pass.
Geocode all 500 addresses in the Address column of my Excel sheet and write the latitude and longitude into the Lat and Lng columns using Google Maps
What You Get
- The Lat column fills with decimal latitude for each address (e.g., 37.7749)
- The Lng column fills with decimal longitude (e.g., -122.4194)
- Rows where Maps returns no result get a note written in an adjacent status column — no silent blanks
- Rows that already have values in Lat and Lng are skipped, so re-running is safe
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The addresses have inconsistent formatting — some with suite numbers, some without, some abbreviated
For every row in the Address column of my Excel sheet, normalize the address to a standard format using Google Maps geocoding and write the formatted_address from the Maps response back into the Address column, then fill the Lat column with latitude and the Lng column with longitude
Some rows have city and state in separate columns instead of a full address
For each row in my Excel workbook, combine the values in the Street column, the City column, and the State column into a single address string and geocode it using Google Maps — write the resulting latitude into the Lat column and longitude into the Lng column
A second worksheet has regional overrides — some addresses should use a corrected version listed there
Look up each address in the Address column of Sheet1 against the Address column in the Overrides worksheet. If there's a match, use the corrected address from Overrides for geocoding instead. Write lat/lng into the Lat and Lng columns of Sheet1 using Google Maps.
The dataset has duplicates and inconsistent casing — clean, deduplicate, and geocode in one pass
In my Excel workbook, the Address column has addresses with mixed casing and duplicates. Deduplicate the list, standardize each address using Google Maps, geocode each unique address, and write the results into a clean table on a new worksheet called Geocoded — with columns for original address, formatted address, latitude, and longitude
One prompt handles the normalization, the deduplication, and the geocoding in a single operation.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with an address column — then ask SheetXAI to geocode the whole thing in one pass. If you're mapping locations or building spatial models, also see how to run a nearby place search from coordinates or compute a driving distance matrix.