We use maps every day, both personally and professionally. While they can help navigate to the dentist or find nearby restaurants, they can be especially powerful when combined with your company’s data. You might map your customers, leads, and assets or even enlist a custom map to help you track your business proposals. When you give a geographic context to your spreadsheets, you can add a whole new dimension of understanding.

When you combine your locations with additional data and put them both on the map, even more is possible. For example, imagine if you could show your mapped locations—whatever they may be—alongside the boundaries and borders of a city, county, or zip code. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to do just that. By exporting your map from BatchGeo and importing it into Google Earth, you’ll be able to turn on the appropriate boundary layer(s) and see your data in a new way. Whether you wish to do so with counties to see which points are inside or outside each county or with cities or ZIP and postal codes, Google Earth has multiple border options, all of which we’ll demonstrate below.

Export Your BatchGeo Map

First things first, you’ll want to export your map from BatchGeo. Do this so that you can then import it into Google Earth to show the locations alongside your preferred boundaries—such as a city, county, or postal code.

But before doing so, you’ll want to have a map of your data ready. You can quickly copy-paste a list of locations from a spreadsheet to create a map.

Create A Map of Your Locations

Of course, the first step in any online mapping endeavor is to properly prepare your data. You’ll want an address and other location data within your spreadsheet, which might look something like this:

Then you can follow these simple steps to create your map:

1. Open your spreadsheet
2. Select (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A) and copy (Ctrl+C or Cmd+C) your data
3. Open your web browser and navigate to batchgeo.com
4. Click on the location data box with the example data in it, then paste (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V) your own data
5. Check to make sure you have the proper location data columns available by clicking “Validate and Set Options”
6. Select the proper location column from each drop-down
7. Click “Make Map” and watch as the geocoder performs its process

The end result is an interactive map, like this sales example below.

View Sales in a full screen map

And for more about map-making on the web, check out our in-depth guide on the subject.

Create KML File

With your map primed and ready, right-click and select the Export to Google Earth option, our automatic KML creator which allows you to export KML from Google Maps, or in this case, the Google Maps API BatchGeo uses to map your data.

You can learn more about our Excel to KML feature, which converts any spreadsheet into a shareable format used by Google Earth and other geographic tools. The next step will be to bring this downloaded KML file of your BatchGeo map into Google Earth.

Import into Google Earth

Now you’re ready to show your map’s locations alongside boundaries. The process involves adding your BatchGeo map into the platform that can show cities, counties, or zip codes: Google Earth.

While Google markets a “newer” web version, it doesn’t have the same boundary options as its desktop companion. Therefore, we’ll be using the desktop app most tend to associate with the platform. If you don’t already have the free Pro software, you can download it here.

Then, to import Google Earth KMLs, follow the steps outlined below:

• Open Google Earth Pro on your desktop
• Click File > Import… and select the KML file we previously downloaded from BatchGeo

With your BatchGeo locations transferred into Google Earth, we can now turn on our desired city, county, or ZIP boundary settings.

Turn on Google Earth’s Boundary Layer

To view the appropriate boundaries, we’ll take advantage of Google Earth Pro’s Layers dropdown, which has countless options. Our focus will be on city, county, and ZIP borders.

You can find both city and ZIP boundaries under US Government dropdown (under “More”).

As for county lines, these can be found in 2nd Level Admin Regions (under the “Borders and Labels” > “Borders” dropdowns). Simply check that box to see one or more of these boundary options going forward.

Of course, you can zoom in and out to see what side of the boundary any of your points lands on. This can be useful for sales zones or to confirm which area a customer lives in.

Pair BatchGeo‘s free mapping tool with Google Earth Pro’s Layers options for a seamless experience today.

Calling all movie fans (which, after more than a year of periodic quarantine, is probably just about everyone). It’s not every day you had a chance to buy the house from The Silence of the Lambs. The infamous Pennsylvania home went on the market in September 2020. But it’s not the only famous movie filming location you’re able to step foot in.

There are hundreds of movie locations to pay a visit. Most are clustered in three states, one of which may surprise even the most dedicated movie buff. Or, if your interest is piqued based on the types of sets (outdoors locations, hotels, prisons, etc.) you’ll find those on the map below.

View Famous Movie Locations in a full screen map

We combined data from The Active Times and Cheapism to make the map. We also added Silence of the Lambs’ house for good measure—along with images. Now let’s see where most of these famous movie houses, transportation stations, hotels, etc. are located.

The Cities & States With the Most Films

While plenty of twists and turns took place in quite a few of these film spots, where they’re located isn’t too shocking. Unsurprisingly, most of the locations where films are shot are located in major U.S. cities like N.Y.C. and L.A., as you’ll see below.

• New York City – 10 famous film locations
• Los Angeles – 9
• Chicago – 5
• London – 4
• San Francisco – 3
• Philadelphia – 3
• Winnetka – 2
• Boston – 2
• Beverly Hills – 2
• Atlanta – 2

London, England, is the only international city home to multiple famous film locations on the lists we used. Those London locales include Selfridges from Love Actually, the Notting Hill Bookshop, Buckingham Palace in Paddington, and King’s Cross Station for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

A place we didn’t recognize as a major city was Winnetka, Illinois. Both Home Alone‘s McCallister house and Uncle Buck‘s New Trier Township High School are located in the small village 16 miles north of downtown Chicago.

States With Several Sets

For film aficionados interested in road-tripping to multiple locations where films are shot, several states have more than one. Those eight states are:

• California – 23
• New York – 10
• Illinois – 8
• Pennsylvania – 4
• Massachusetts – 3
• Georgia – 3
• Ohio – 2
• Hawaii – 2

It was easy to guess California‘s place on this list. After all, three Golden State Cities were mentioned in the previous section. We also previously discovered New York‘s sets are all in the Big Apple. As for Illinois, Winnetka claims two famous movie locations. That leaves five in Chicago (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off‘s Art Institute of Chicago, the Crain Communications Building in Adventures in Babysitting, and The Untouchables‘s Union Station are just a few examples). Finally, one film set in Woodstock (Groundhog Day‘s Cherry Tree Inn), which wraps up where these famous movie sets are located. Now, let’s move on to the various types.

Types of Well-Known Movie Locations

Famous movie locations are made up of residences like the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (Pretty Woman), the Mrs. Doubtfire house, and Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment. But more public landmarks like Tiffany’s jewelry store, Alcatraz prison, and King’s Cross Station also qualify. As such, these locations may be divided into nine types of well-known film sets, including outdoor locations.

There are 16 famous outdoor locations pinned on the map. Many of these valleys, coasts, and islands are located throughout Hawaii, including Kauai’s Hanapepe Valley, where much of the Jurassic Park franchise was filmed. Additionally, James Cameron’s Avatar took place off of the Big Island of Hawaii’s Hāmākua Coast.

Multiple movie directors preferred to film throughout Ireland. The Emerald Isle’s Skellig Michael island was a location of two Star Wars movies (The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi). Additionally, the Irish beaches of Ballinesker and Curracloe were featured in Saving Private Ryan.

Outdoor locations aside, categories of famous movie locations include:

• Hotels & residences (15)
• Entertainment & shopping (12)
• Palaces, plazas, & other landmarks (11)
• Museums & prisons (10)
• Food & drink (9)
• Education & religion (9)
• Transport (7)
• Cities & towns (4)

Select one or multiple groups on the map to see the famous movie locations that fall into the nine categories. Or, keep reading for how and why to add images to your maps.

Incorporate Your Images

The places you want to visit—including your favorite movie locations—are cluttering your Notes app or spreadsheet. Instead, transfer them to a custom map so you can see where in the world you want to go.

In addition to plotting your points, you can add images you find on the web or Pinterest to your map, reminding you of why you want to visit in the first place. Start mapping your bucket list locations along with your images today at batchgeo.com.

Put your finger on a globe and drag it across. Do you end up pointing at a horizontal or vertical line? These geographic coordinates are invisible on the actual planet yet used on maps and globes everywhere to pinpoint specific locations. However, sometimes these very helpful lines are in an unhelpful format. Whether you’d rather your latitude and longitude coordinates be in decimal degrees (DD) or degrees, minutes, and seconds (DMS), Excel makes it easy—no math required.

We’ll cover exactly how to convert the coordinates into decimals (or go from decimals to degrees) in a matter of steps. But first, you’ll want to ensure latitude and longitude are in individual columns.

Move Your Coordinates

Before you can convert your coordinate pair into the format you want, you’ll need to ensure latitude and longitude, along with the degrees, minutes, and seconds of each are in separate Excel columns. Why can’t we do this manually? Imagine you have 200+ rows of coordinate pairs. You need a way to select an entire column and separate its components at once.

One of the easiest methods is Excel’s ‘Text to Columns’. The tool enables you to identify a point in your text that Excel can separate for you. Let’s see how this popular Excel tool helps us manage our coordinates.

Use Excel’s Text to Columns to Separate Lat and Long

The first thing we’ll want to do is separate the coordinates into different cells. A geography reminder: latitude typically comes first, followed by longitude). To get started:

1. Select the cells you’d like to separate
2. Navigate to Excel’s “Data” menu
3. Select “Text to Columns…”
4. In Step 1 of the Text Wizard, identify whether you want to separate your data by Delimited characters (commas, tabs, etc between your data) or Fixed width (moving lines between the fields)
5. Step 2 is where you’ll determine the specific part of your text to separate (the Space in our example)
6. In most cases, you can click finish and be done

Amend your headings to better fit your updated data and the result is separated latitude and longitude coordinates. Now let’s apply the same steps to separate the degrees and minutes (and seconds if you have them!) of each coordinate.

Use the Same Tool to Isolate Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds

Now that we have latitude and longitude in different cells, we can separate our data even further. We’ll want to divide the coordinates into individual columns for degrees, minutes, and seconds. This will come in handy for converting into decimals later.

Let’s get started:

1. Optional As we delve deeper into Text to Columns, you may find it helpful to copy the character(s) already in your spreadsheet (like °) instead of scouring the web or your Excel menu for the Special Characters we often see with coordinates
2. Select your desired cells (either your new latitude or longitude column), ensuring there are a few columns to the right of either
3. Once again, navigate to Excel’s “Data” menu
4. Select “Text to Columns…”
5. Choose between the two data types in Step 1 of the Wizard
6. Determine what character or space to separate the degree (° in our example) in Step 2
7. Click Finish

Now that we have degrees set, we’ll do the same steps above to separate the minutes (′) and would repeat if our coordinates contained seconds.

There we have it! Simply replace the headings with something more apt and you’re good to move onto the next step: conversion. You can also discover even more Excel skills in our Simplify Complicated Data in Excel Spreadsheets post.

Convert Latitude and Longitude to Decimals in Excel

With your data in separate columns, there’s nothing to stop you from converting your coordinates to decimals. As noted in our Latitude and Longitude in Excel: Calculate Distance, Convert Degrees, and Geocode Addresses post, the formula for doing so is:

=Degree+Minute/60+Second/3600

To use it in Excel, follow the steps outlined here:

1. Add a heading (such as Decimal) to a blank column
2. Copy and paste the formula above into a cell under your new heading
3. Change the degree, minutes, and second placeholders in the formula to the corresponding cell number (i.e. A2)
4. Drag or copy the formula down the rest of the column

There you have it! Your DMS coordinates are now in a decimal format. But what if you want to transform decimal coordinates back to DMS? We’ll go over that as well.

Excel Decimal Degrees to DMS

If you need to reverse the change from DMS to decimal or you started with unwanted decimals, here’s how to go about it.

1. Select the decimal column
2. Navigate to Excel’s “Data” menu
3. Select “Text to Columns…”
4. Opt for Fixed width in Step 1 of the Text Wizard
5. Add a line before the decimal point
6. Finish

The first column now houses your degrees. As for minutes, take your remaining decimal and multiply it by 60 in a new column. Drag down to the rest of the cells.

If you were working with seconds, you would once again take only the decimal of the minutes and multiply it by 60 in a new column. You could then use =CONCATENATE to put it all together.

We’ve gone back and forth between degrees, minutes, seconds, and decimals. While we could continue to do this all day long thanks to Excel’s tools, there’s a better use of our time.

Visualize Your Lat + Long Points

After converting latitude and longitude to your desired format, your points are sitting pretty in your spreadsheet. But there may be a better place for your data.

With a custom map, you can visualize your latitude and longitude data and filter out what you want to see at any given moment. Take a look for yourself on our example map below.

View Top 100 Stores of 2019 in a full screen map

Zoom in and out of your locations with a double click of your mouse. Different colored markers represent the various values of your data. Get started with better data visualization today at batchgeo.com.