HERE + Excel: Pull Location Data, Routes, and Maps Into Your Workbook

The Problem with Getting HERE Location Data Into Your Workbook

You have an Excel workbook full of addresses, depot coordinates, delivery stops, or field inspection sites, and you need HERE to enrich it: geocoding to get coordinates, routing to get drive times, traffic data to plan dispatch, nearby places to analyze site suitability. The data you want is a few API calls away. Getting those results into the workbook is what takes the morning.

Excel does not have a native HERE connector. Power Query can call external APIs if you build the query, and a developer can write a VBA macro or Office Script, but neither handles multi-step chains without significant engineering work. For most logistics, field ops, and planning teams, the gap between "I have the data" and "I have the enriched data" is too wide to cross without a workaround.

Below are the four ways Excel users typically get HERE location data into a workbook. Only the last one keeps up with real operational work.

Method 1: Manual Lookup and Paste

The path of least resistance is opening a geocoding website, pasting addresses one at a time, copying coordinates back into the workbook, and repeating for 60 or 600 rows. For routing, you paste origin and destination into Google Maps, read the estimate, and type it by hand. For traffic, you check a traffic app and write in what you see.

When this works:

• Five rows or fewer
• A one-off task where precision is not critical
• You have the time and the patience

When it breaks:

• Anything over ten rows
• Any workflow that runs more than once
• Any step that requires coordinates from a previous step before you can continue
• Results that need to be reproducible or auditable

The arithmetic of this is punishing. Sixty client sites at three minutes each is three hours you do not have, and the moment the workbook is updated you do it again.

Method 2: Use Power Automate to Call HERE When Rows Change

Power Automate is the natural automation layer for Excel files on OneDrive or SharePoint. You build a flow that watches the workbook for new rows and calls HERE's API when one appears.

This works for event-driven moments:

• New site added to the planning sheet → geocode automatically
• New delivery created → fetch drive time from depot
• New employee address entered → find nearest transit station

This fails for batch and analytical work:

• Geocoding 300 rows already in the workbook before you set up the flow
• Running a matrix routing job across 5 depots and 40 customers
• Chaining geocoding, routing, and isoline calls in one operation
• Any operation that reads across multiple rows and aggregates

Power Automate fires row by row on new additions. It cannot process an existing range, build a distance matrix, or chain API calls where step 2 depends on the output of step 1. A 500-row geocoding job also costs per run, which adds up quickly for large ranges.

Method 3: The Previous Generation, Location Add-Ins and Connector Tools

Until recently, the best option for repeatable Excel location enrichment was a category of specialist add-ins, geocoding add-ins, mapping plug-ins, routing connectors. You installed the add-in, mapped your columns, pointed it at a range, and ran it. The output was consistent, the mapping was saved, and a non-developer could run it without writing code.

That was a real improvement. But each add-in did one thing. Geocoding was one tool. Routing was another. You could not chain them in a single run. And if you needed something the add-in did not support, like a conditional geocode that skips rows already filled, or a matrix job across two separate tabs, you were back to VBA or Office Scripts. The tools also tended to break when workbook structure changed, since they relied on fixed column references.

This is the category we think of as the previous generation. Solid for a single, fixed operation, but it did not scale to real operational complexity.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different path. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook, on Excel for the web and Excel desktop. It reads the workbook, understands the data, and through its built-in HERE integration it can geocode, route, run matrix calculations, pull traffic incidents, find nearby places, and compute isolines, all in plain English, without separate add-ins for each API endpoint.

Example 1: Your Data Is Already in the Workbook

You have a field operations workbook with 12 active construction sites, each with a city name in column A. You need current weather before sending the morning site report.

For each city in column A, fetch the current weather from HERE and write temperature (Celsius), conditions, and wind speed to columns E, F, and G.

SheetXAI reads the range, calls HERE Weather for each location, and writes the results back. No API key configuration in the add-in, no column mapping step, no VBA.

Example 2: Your Data Needs Prep Before the HERE Call

Sometimes your workbook has addresses but not coordinates, or coordinates with missing rows, or two tabs that need to be combined first.

Geocode every address in the Clients tab where columns B and C are blank, writing lat/lng to those columns. Then compute drive time in minutes from the warehouse at 52.4862,-1.8904 to each client's coordinates and write it to column D.

SheetXAI handles the condition check, the geocoding pass, and the routing pass in one prompt. You do not build a two-step Power Automate flow or write an Office Script that calls two APIs in sequence.

Which Method Should You Use

For a one-time geocoding task with a handful of rows, manual lookup is acceptable. For event-driven work where a new row should always produce a HERE result automatically, Power Automate is a reasonable fit.

For batch work, multi-step chains, or anything that requires a result from one HERE call before making the next, SheetXAI is the only option that handles it in a single prompt. If you are doing this more than once a month, the configuration overhead of any other method costs more time than it saves.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with address or coordinate data, then ask it to enrich it using HERE. The HERE integration is included in every plan. For specific workflows, see how to bulk-geocode addresses in Excel, how to optimize a multi-stop delivery route in Excel, or browse the full integrations directory.