BombCenter
New Member
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2011
- Messages
- 19
So I was approached by Accounting with an interesting project today. I work IT for a large-ish construction company, and one of the hassles of mileage reimbursement is getting the driving distances for all the field technicians from their respective homes to the site they're currently deployed to. Accounting, being familiar with Excel, wanted to know if I could author a spreadsheet that would accept a list of addresses (e.g., Column A) and a list of destinations (e.g., Column C) and return the driving distances between them (e.g., Column E). As an added feature (but not required), they'd like driving routes color-coded and super-imposed on a dynamically generated map (which the API can supply) bound to a div on the spreadsheet.
I've briefly looked at the Google Maps DistanceMatrix API (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distancematrix/), and generating the query and parsing the returned JSON/XML (example result: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/distancematrix/json?origins=Vancouver+BC|Seattle&destinations=San+Francisco|Victoria+BC&mode=bicycling&language=fr-
FR&sensor=false) is simple enough, but where I'm stumped is: How do I get Excel to fetch it into a string or whatever that I could then parse values out of? Is this possible?
I've briefly looked at the Google Maps DistanceMatrix API (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distancematrix/), and generating the query and parsing the returned JSON/XML (example result: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/distancematrix/json?origins=Vancouver+BC|Seattle&destinations=San+Francisco|Victoria+BC&mode=bicycling&language=fr-
FR&sensor=false) is simple enough, but where I'm stumped is: How do I get Excel to fetch it into a string or whatever that I could then parse values out of? Is this possible?
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