A friend has 400 company locations in an Excel spreadsheet. He wants to upload them to appear on a map. I looked into Google Maps and it looks like you can do this, but it requires using their API. Is there something else out there that’s simple and free to do this? I should mention, he wants to do this, to see where in the state they should locate a sales office which would be accessible to the majority of these companies on the list.
What you’re looking for, instead of developing software to call the Google Maps API and put pins on a map based on the spreadsheet, is software which already exists to call the Google Maps API and put pins on the map based on the spreadsheet.
Because that’s as simple (iterate over the API using each set of coordinates) and free (access to the Web API for 25,000 map loads a day) as it gets.
I found one, it apparently uses Google’s API to do the map. It’s also free and allows bulk upload. I played around with it, it works well for my friends needs and doesn’t require any programming.
You can also do this with Google’s own Fusion Tables and import the CSV:
If you want to get fancy, you can also use free GIS software like QGIS to plot the points and then overlay on them on top of layers that show commercially-zoned buildings, or areas with low crime, or within whatever distance of a police station/college/bus stop/whatever other random criteria he wants to use while siting the office.
If you’d rather put the markers on a Leaflet-styled cartography from Open Street Map, using an open-source stack, you may be interested in