More data does not produce more insights unless you have a way to analyze the data. In fact, that’s why there are hundreds of functions build into Excel and other spreadsheet software. The functions are what make up its most important functionality. Yet, you can’t use =HEATMAP to create a visualization of geographic density in your data. But what if that was almost as easy as an Excel function?

If you’ve spent any time using Excel, you’ve likely spent what feels like a similar amount of time searching the internet for help with its functions. You probably have come across many custom functions written by other Excel enthusiasts. Though the authors mean well, these sub-routines are often hard to use and have questionable security. For this and other reasons, BatchGeo made sense as a separate web service. We make Google Maps—and heat map overlays—as easy as copy and paste.

How to Make a Google Map

In our in-depth Google Map tutorial, we show some of the technical steps you get to skip when you use BatchGeo. Here’s how to create a basic marker map, which we’ll convert to a heat map in the next section:

1. In your spreadsheet, highlight and copy (Ctrl+C, or Cmd+C on Mac) all rows, including your header row.
2. Go to our map making tool and paste (Ctrl+V, or Cmd+V on Mac) your data into the box.
3. Click “Map Now” and follow the steps to complete your map. We make intelligent guesses of location columns, but you can override them in the Validate & Set Options menu.

You’ll see a preview of your map and, if it looks good, you can save it. Include your email address so you can make edits in the future.

Now you have a map like the one embedded above. All the other data in the map is browsable by clicking individual markers. And we even get an idea of their density by the overlapping markers.

But it’s not a heat map. Not yet.

How to Make a Heat Map From Your Excel Spreadsheet

Now that you have a Google Map, you can easily activate the heat map layer with Advanced Mode available in BatchGeo Pro (30 day money back guarantee).

While signed in and viewing your map:

1. Ensure Advanced Mode is enabled by clicking your account menu in the upper right.
2. Right click (Ctrl+click on Mac) over your map and select “Heat View”

The markers on your map will disappear and be replaced by a heat map view.

You can zoom and pan your heat map as you would any Google Map. Our customers have used heat maps to gain valuable insights from open data, competition research, and more. Many have made decisions that saved or made their company thousands of dollars, or more.

Some example heat map use cases include:

• Map all places in a business category to determine potential new locations that are under-served.
• Map customers or leads to choose equitable sales zones or regions.
• Map a city’s violent crime to show hot spots for a comprehensive journalistic report.

It’s unlikely that Excel will soon have a =HEATMAP function of this caliber, so we’ve created our web service to fill this gap.

Try us out for free and create your first map.

Buying a house can be an intense experience. Every hour of available time can go to searching, researching, driving by, and viewing potential purchases. Unlike other things you buy, there are no five star reviews or apples-to-apples price comparisons. That’s why visiting a home and neighborhood are so important. To simplify viewings, many listings have open houses, which means buyers plan their Saturday and Sunday afternoons around hour ranges found in real estate listings. Many BatchGeo users have discovered how much easier the planning can be with a geographic view of their chosen open houses.

View Open Houses This Weekend in a full screen map

Your real estate map starts with a spreadsheet you’re using to track your potential future homes. What you include may vary, but it’s likely to have the address, price, and number of bedrooms and bathrooms. For open houses, you can separate out the timing into its own spreadsheet column. In the example map above, we can group by any of that data, which BatchGeo either shows as a range or unique values. Click a marker on the map and you’ll see all the data from the spreadsheet, including that open house timeframe.

Let’s see how you could create your own, how to skip the manual work, and look into a method you could use to simplify finding open houses while on the go.

Create a Real Estate Listings Spreadsheet

The modern real estate search includes looking at hundreds of listings on the web. You get new listings delivered to your inbox, and you scour search sites to find the neighborhoods and criteria you’re after. What do you do when you discover a potential choice? Before you see it, you need to track it.

For many, including BatchGeo users, the tracking happens in a spreadsheet. The header row includes the location columns, bedrooms, bathrooms, price, and open house times.

As you find the places you’re interested in seeing, just jot those pieces of info into a spreadsheet. If it’s worth the time to see, it’s worth the time to track in your spreadsheet. If it’s too much work, you may be able to use a site such as import.io to convert website searches into downloadable data.

Group by Open House Hours

You may find yourself desiring even more automation, with a solution that tells you exactly the order to see the houses during your tours. This turns out to be difficult or inefficient (what Computer Scientists call the Traveling Salesman Problem). However, the BatchGeo mobile maps features can help you determine where to go next while you’re out and about. All it takes is a little more setup in your spreadsheet.

View Open Houses, Filter by Times in a full screen map

The above map has the same locations as the first map in this post, but we’ve added another eight columns to the spreadsheet for the potential open house hours. We noted that our listings started no earlier than 10:00 a.m. and ended no later than 2:00 p.m. — four potential hours for showings on Saturday and another four on Sunday. If you find yourself ready to go to an open house at 1:17 p.m. on Saturday, just group the “Sa1” field with “Y” to see the four listings that are open during the one o’clock hour.

It’s a little more up-front work, but it helps you be able to filter your map in the moment. Can you fit one more viewing in? That depends on how close the open house listings are, a question you can arrange your spreadsheet and map to answer.

Are you ready to use BatchGeo to find your next home (or perhaps wow your home buyer clients)? See how BatchGeo can help you with mapping solutions for real estate.

For those enabling political change, there’s no better way than face-to-face, one-on-one interaction. That’s where door-to-door political canvassing comes in. No matter the candidate or the level of office, a well-organized approach will help you more efficiently approach the right voters. That’s where a voter map could come in handy. BatchGeo makes turning a spreadsheet into a map as easy as copy-paste.

In the United States we have national elections at least every two years and local elections at least once per year. The biggest elections come every four years when the US President is elected, along with all members of the House of Representatives and roughly one-third of the Senate. That is the case in 2016. Since all political canvassing is at a local level, location plays a large role. Let’s see how political volunteers could use a map of locations for door-to-door canvassing.

View Example Political Canvassing Map in a full screen map

The above map is purely fictional, but included as an example of what a pair of canvassers might use. Though the addresses are real (taken from business listings in Santa Monica, California), the names are from a Star Wars character name generator. Volunteers might split the work up by Zip code, as shown here, other fields, or some other means. Read on to see some ideas for how to group voters for easy canvassing.

But first, you need your own list to visit, hopefully with the names of real voters.

Gather Your List of Addresses

One way to canvass is to go truly door-to-door, reaching everyone in a neighborhood. A map might not be as useful in that case, though you could potentially plot demographic data on a map and use that to select neighborhoods. However, the most efficient method involves direct targeting of individuals at specific locations. In this case, a map would be extremely useful.

Before you create your map, you need a list of addresses. These are the voters you and other volunteers will visit. There are several methods you can use to obtain names and addresses:

• Your candidate or cause’s donors
• Public voter registration records
• Donor list of complementary cause or candidate
• Consumer direct mail company lists

Obviously, check your local laws that might restrict privacy or other aspects of targeting individuals in this manner.

Create a Map of Voters

Now that you have a list of addresses, it’s likely stored in a spreadsheet-like format, such as CSV, XLS (Excel), or tab-delimited. Or maybe you keep it stored in a Google Spreadsheet. Regardless of the format, it’s best to open the document in some sort of spreadsheet software so you can confirm it displays in rows and columns and includes a header row at the top. Those labels help BatchGeo inspect your data, make assumptions, and display the data back on the map.

With data like the above, you can simply highlight all the cells, copy with Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on Mac), then paste into BatchGeo’s data box using Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac).

BatchGeo makes some guesses about address, city, state, and postal code fields. You can click Validate & Set Options to check or correct these assumptions. Then map and our fast, accurate geocoder will convert every row of your spreadsheet into markers on your map.

Once you’ve saved your map, you can share any non-private map with everyone on your team by copying the URL. Private maps and more secure sharing is only available to Pro accounts.

Armed with their mobile-optimized voter maps, your volunteers are ready to hit the streets. Here are some ideas of how they might use the voter maps.

Group Voters by Zip Code or City

In many areas, your voters will be across multiple postal codes or even cities. If that is the case, you can use the BatchGeo grouping functionality to filter by unique values in that field. For example, you may have voters across six different Zip codes. Assign each volunteer one or more Zip codes and send them a link to your map.

Each volunteer can then choose Zip code in the grouping menu in the lower left. When they select their Zip code, the map will quickly filter to only the chosen Zip code. Choose a second Zip code and it will be added to the group that is displayed.

You can use this method to group by city or any field in your spreadsheet.

Group Voters by Volunteer

An alternative to assigning by region labels is to assign by volunteer in your spreadsheet. Simply add a new column to your spreadsheet called “Volunteer” and add the name of a volunteer for each row. When you paste your data into BatchGeo, it will make the volunteer name a grouping option.

You can use this method of pre-assigning records to spread the work equally between volunteers. Pre-assigning also simplifies what the volunteer needs to remember. Most people remember their name, while memorizing a list of Zip codes is much harder.

Group Voters by Last Name

Another way you could split up the efforts is to use alphabetical ranges by last name. For example, one person takes anyone whose names starts with A-M, the other takes N-Z. This is another circumstance where you need to add another column to your spreadsheet. However, in this case a spreadsheet can do most of the work for you.

Create a new column called “Alpha Range.” In the second row (just below the header), add the following formula:

=IF(CODE(UPPER(LEFT(B2, 1))) < CODE("N"), "A-M", "N-Z")

The formula assumes that the Last Name is in the B column, so adjust as necessary. Everything else should work for the example name ranges. If it's right for the first row, copy the cell and paste it for each additional row. The formula will update for the current row.

Now Go Ring Some Doorbells

Now you should have your list of voters, plan for how to group them, and a map displaying their locations. The only thing left to do is share the map with your team of volunteers and start going door to door. Get started with BatchGeo for free now.