The Scenario
You're three hours into building a mapping dashboard for 2,000 store locations. The data landed in your Google Sheet 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 Google Sheet and talks to Google Maps on your behalf. Open the SheetXAI sidebar, paste your prompt, and it geocodes every row in one pass.
For every row in my Google Sheet where column A has an address and columns B and C are empty, geocode the address using Google Maps and fill column B with latitude and column C with longitude
What You Get
- Column B fills with decimal latitude for each address (e.g., 37.7749)
- Column C fills with decimal longitude (e.g., -122.4194)
- Rows where Maps returns no result get a note written in column D — no silent blanks
- Rows that already have values in B and C 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 column A of my Google Sheet, normalize the address to a standard format using Google Maps geocoding and write the formatted_address from the Maps response into column A itself, then fill column B with latitude and column C with longitude
Some rows have city and state in separate columns instead of a full address
For each row in my Google Sheet, combine the values in column A (street), column B (city), and column C (state) into a single address string and geocode it using Google Maps — write the resulting latitude into column D and longitude into column E
A second tab has regional overrides — some addresses should use a corrected version listed there
Look up each address in column A of Sheet1 against the Address column in the Overrides tab. If there's a match, use the corrected address from the Overrides tab for geocoding instead. Write lat/lng into columns B and C of Sheet1 using Google Maps.
The dataset has duplicates and inconsistent casing — clean, deduplicate, and geocode in one pass
In my Google Sheet, column A 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 sheet called Geocoded — with columns for original address, formatted address, latitude, and longitude
The pattern: combining cleanup with the geocoding call in one prompt means you're not running two separate passes. Ask for both together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet 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.