ArcGIS for Microsoft 365 transforms aspects of location data (such as a pair of x,y coordinates, an address, or the name of a place) to a location on the earth's surface and represents that on a map. This process is known as geocoding.
ArcGIS for Microsoft 365 uses the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service and the ArcGIS GeoEnrichment Service to detect point locations (such as addresses and coordinates) and boundary (polygon) locations (such as postal codes, cities, states, and provinces) in data. These services access repositories of location data from more than 170 countries.
For Standard users, these services use the default locators established for all users. If you are signed in to your ArcGIS account, ArcGIS for Microsoft 365 uses the locators configured for your organization to place the data coordinates more accurately on the map. To learn more about locators, see Introduction to locators.
To ensure the highest positioning accuracy, you may need to clean up or otherwise review and configure the location data to ensure that it can be read by these two ArcGIS services. For example, when you add a data layer to a map, choose the location type that best represents the information. Location information from the data is used to create a relationship between the data and the specified location type.
Although ArcGIS for Microsoft 365 includes functionality to provide a location on the map based on the best possible available location data, the more you organize and prepare the data before you add it to a map, the more likely the map results will be accurate every time. See Supported notation formats for information about the notation formats you can use in your data.
Related topics
See the topics listed in the following table for more information about data and geocoding:
| ArcGIS for Excel | ArcGIS for Power BI | ArcGIS for SharePoint |
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