Over half of Americans send a Christmas card or other holiday greeting toward the end of every year. That’s probably higher if you consider businesses sending notes to their customers and leads. If you’re one of the majority preparing this year’s bundle, you probably have a spreadsheet with the names and addresses of everyone on your list. Or, if you don’t have such a document, maybe you’ll think about starting one. Among the many benefits you get from an organized list of recipients is the ability to easily plot them on a map. We’ll go over that and more in this post.

The first and best reason to keep a spreadsheet of addresses is organization. Physical address books become filled with redacted entries as people move. Or worse, the entries are outdated or duplicative. A spreadsheet allows you to search and update when you receive a new address. You can also easily share the document with someone else, such as a spouse or other family member. In fact, services like Google Spreadsheets let you share and make edits live, without ever sending around attachments.

Another good reason to keep a spreadsheet with all your addresses is, if you choose, you can mail merge the labels. This may be a controversial suggestion to some who believe in hand-lettering. That’s fine, you can still reap the spreadsheet benefits by printing out your list to make it easy to determine whose envelope you’ve already addressed.

For those sending customer greetings, you can likely export from your CRM software to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet. Either of those formats work great for mail merge and plotting your contacts on a map.

View Holiday Card List in a full screen map

You can see an example map above. At BatchGeo, our card list is short, but filled with a mix of rich, famous, and fictional. In fact, you can filter the map by those three types of people. If you have other information about the people on your list, include it in a column in your spreadsheet, then you can use the grouping feature the same way we did above. Perhaps you want to group by customers, leads, friends, acquaintances, or other attributes. If it’s in your spreadsheet, it will become a powerful, interactive map in BatchGeo.

Other fun things you’ll see from your map are where everyone lives. Are they all in the same city? Maybe they’re in a couple clumps around where you grew up and where you live now. You could even use basic map clustering to tabulate the areas with a greater number of contacts. This is especially useful when mapping sales leads, of course, but it’s fun to see even for your friends list.

So, dust off your spreadsheet of addresses, or make a new one. Then visualize that data on a BatchGeo map today.

Portlandia fans will be tickled and Portlanders unsurprised to learn the Oregon city has performed a census of its apple trees. Just about every one of the fruit trees across Portland’s 145 square miles had its location, condition, and size notated in data that is downloadable by neighborhood from the city’s website. Since BatchGeo is a Portland company and we have a fun and easy mapping tool, we thought it was a perfect example to show off the over 1,000 apple trees that call Portland home.

View Apple Trees of Portland in a full screen map

At first you may notice that it appears there are areas of the city without any apple trees. That may be accurate for, say, downtown Portland. Already a five year project with more than 800 volunteers, the city hasn’t made it to every neighborhood yet. Still, with over 60% of the city enumerated, we can learn plenty about the apple trees.

For example, almost half of the trees are considered in good condition, while only 10% are in poor health. However, there doesn’t appear to be a particular area of the city that is bad for apple trees. The biggest is adjacent to Sewallcrest Park in Southeast Portland. At 38 inches diameter (measured at breast height), it’s a sizable apple tree, and an outlier in the neighborhood. There a place where the trees are bigger or smaller. All of Portland loves its apple trees.

In fact, Portland loves all its trees. The city even set the Guiness World Record in 2013 with almost 1,000 tree huggers, some of whom are shown in the video below.

And it turns out, the city doesn’t just count its apple trees. It counts all of its street trees. Over 100,000 of them, all with downloadable spreadsheets waiting to be uploaded to BatchGeo for visualization.

While Portland is ahead of many cities in open government data, you very likely can find some for your own city or country. In the United States there’s even a clearinghouse of these civic datasets called Data.gov. If you’re stuck on tree data, there’s currently 942 datasets matching that search term.

Open data can also be found all over Wikipedia. Rather than the Excel files common with government data, the worldwide encyclopedia often uses web-based tables that are easily copy and paste-able into your own spreadsheets–or directly to BatchGeo.

We show an example of copying, cleaning, and mapping Wikipedia data in our tutorial, How to Map Open Data.

October in the United States is the month when communities make their greatest efforts to scare each other. With Halloween shortly upon us, we noticed at least 100 cities and towns across the US that won’t have to try very hard. For these, such as Fresh Kills, New York, and Red Devil, Alaska, the fright is right in the name.

View Scary Place Names for Halloween in a full screen map

Use the map above to explore these scary locations, or type your zip code or city name in the form below to find the spooky-named place nearest you.

Search for nearest location

No visit to one of these cities would be complete without a costume, at least when we’re so close to Halloween. We’ve taken the effort of choosing the best disguise to wear for each of the cities. A demon leads the way to accompany the many places with devil, hell, and satan in the name. Next comes a Jack-o-lantern costume—who knew there were so many places named Pumpkin Center? A ghost, a murderer, and Dracula round out the top five.

Naturally, you want to dress as a very specific candy bar in Hershey, Pennsylvania. You can be a little more creative in Chocolate Bayou, Texas, or Candy Town, Ohio. And if you’re looking for a treat, you’ll find a city with that name in Arkansas, Georgia, and Louisiana.

Some other common Halloween costumes only seem appropriate for specific cities. How you dress in Frankenstein, Missouri, is pretty well spelled out in the name. Bat Cave, North Carolina, gives you little choice beyond the caped crusader. And, of course, in Sleepy Hollow, New York, you must go headless.

New York state is home to the most Halloween-themed places in our list, which came from the Accuracy Project. New Yorkers have eight cities to choose from, followed closely by North Carolina with seven. Alabama, Louisiana , Michigan, and Tennessee each have five. But don’t fret, 40 states in all are represented, so unless you’re in Hawaii, you likely have one somewhat nearby.

The form to find your nearest place is a feature available with every BatchGeo map. You can use it to make a store locator map, or to find the nearest of any type of location on your map, spooky or not.