Geocoding is the process of transforming a description of a location (such as a pair of coordinates, an address, or the name of a place) to a location on the earth's surface.
You can locate addresses, cities, landmarks, business names, and other places in more than 100 countries. ArcGIS for Excel uses ArcGIS World Geocoding Service to locate point features (such as addresses, United States cities, and world cities), and ArcGIS GeoEnrichment Service to locate boundary features (such as ZIP Codes, states, provinces, and countries).
When you add data to a map from Microsoft Excel, choose the location type that best represents the information. Location information from the data is used to create a relationship between the business data and the specified location type.
Location types
The following location types are available if your organization is using ArcGIS Online:
- Coordinates—Latitude and longitude values represent an x,y coordinate location on the map. You can map x,y coordinate data in either the World Geodetic Survey 1984 (WGS84) or the Web Mercator coordinate system. If the latitude (y) values fall between -90 and 90 and the longitude (x) values range from -180 to 180, use WGS84. If the latitude and longitude values are in meters and have six, seven, or eight digits before (to the left of) the decimal point, use Web Mercator. You can also choose one of the many coordinate systems that ArcGIS supports.
- Address—Depending on the geographic region of your organization, address data can be composed of any of the following multiline fields: address, neighborhood, city, subregion, region, state, province, postal code, United States ZIP Code, country, and so on. The more address elements the
data contains, the more accurate the results will be. The address
elements can be in separate fields, or they can be contained in one
field (single-line address). Both methods of finding addresses are
supported, but the best results are obtained using all address
elements and storing them in separate fields.
Note:
By default, ArcGIS Online uses ArcGIS World Geocoding Service to locate addresses, but you can specify multiple locators, and you can set any one of those as the default locator. If you're using the World Geocoder, see Geocode coverage for information about supported countries.
Your ArcGIS administrator may impose user credit limits on some features, and you may receive a message stating that you have insufficient credits to perform a request. If so, contact your administrator.
- ESRI JSON Geometry—EsriJSON encodes both geometry and feature information into objects. An Esri feature set is a collection of features with the same geometry type and coordinate system. In a JSON document, a feature set is represented by a JSON object. The JSON object has three keys: geometryType, spatialReference, and features. For more information, see EsriJSON.
- Geography—This location type allows you to select an ArcGIS feature service showing boundaries and join it with a layer. These boundaries include states, provinces, United States ZIP Codes, postal codes, and countries. You can search for geographies in your content, your organization, ArcGIS Living Atlas, or from a curated set of administrative boundaries. Geographies are joined to the data and added to the map as polygons, which represent both the shape and the location of the place.
Considerations when choosing a location type
When you use ArcGIS for Excel to plot data on the map, you must choose the correct location type.
Address and Coordinates
When you choose the Address location type, points are generated using ArcGIS World Geocoding Service by default, but your ArcGIS administrator may have also configured other locators for your organization and set one of those as the default.
For the Coordinates location type, data from the identified x and y location columns is used to generate points.
Geography
When you choose a geography, the appropriate shapes are located and retrieved using the specified column or columns for the chosen location type. This is done by associating the rows of data with the location type through a common column, known as a key.
The name of the column in the data does not have to match the column name in the location type; however, the information in the column must be in the same order to produce a match. When a row of data cannot be located—that is, the shape cannot be retrieved from the location type—it's assigned a null shape and is not drawn on the map. The following table shows the supported keys for each location type:
| Location type | Shape type | Supported key |
|---|---|---|
US State | Polygon | The following is required:
|
US ZIP Code | Polygon | One of the following is required:
|
World City | Point | The following is required:
Optionally, you can specify the following:
|
Country | Polygon | The following is required:
|
Custom | Point, line, or polygon (determined by selected map or feature service layer) | Configured by administrator on ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise. Specified for use in ArcGIS for Excel when adding a layer to a map. |
When locating data using geography, ensure that there is a one-to-one relationship between the rows of input data and the shapes in the chosen location type. In a one-to-one relationship, each row of input data corresponds to a single shape on the map. The shape for each row of input data can be determined and drawn on the map.
Choosing an inappropriate location type can cause unexpected results. This is because the wrong location type often leads to a many-to-one or a one-to-many relationship between the input data and the shapes in the chosen location type.
If the data contains duplicate areas, such as multiple ZIP Codes in a state, you can choose to summarize the values of the locations. If you choose not to summarize the data, features are rendered on the map stacked on one another. For example, polygon shapes corresponding to multiple input rows are drawn directly on top of one another on a map.