Reverse Geocoding

Teak McGlukes

New Member
Joined
Jan 16, 2010
Messages
14
Hey guys, just want to let you know first of all, I don’t post a lot on the forums- but I sure do use a TON of the information I find here, it’s so helpful. It’s great to know there is a community of people out there so ready to assist others for free and put in hours of hard work just because they’re nice. So, thank you.

I have a bit of a dilemma. I am trying to do some reverse geocoding in Excel. Reverse geocoding is the process of taking a set of GPS coordinates and turning it into the closest available ‘human readable’ address.

For example, our local sheriff’s office is at 45.520585° latitude by -122.993693° longitude.

There is a service at geonames.org that offers reverse geocoding by a URL API. But, the results come back in XML format, and I just can’t get it to do what I want. I am familiar with web queries, at least ones that come back in standard HTML format. I can write them and insert variables, which I need to do- but I can’t get that working on the XML. You can see what it returns here:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearestAddress?lat=45.520585&lng=-122.991466

Is there a way I can work with this and get it to accept variables? I would like to enter the coordinates into fields in the worksheet and have it go out and look up the address. When I treat it like a regular web query it doesn’t return all of the information.
Something else interesting I found is a guy that created an excel function out of a similar function from the geonames.org site (under the Latitude and Longitude from Geonames section).

http://www.codeforexcelandoutlook.com/excel-vba/latitude-longitude-functions/

So something like that would be great, but he hasn’t built one for the reverse geocoding, and I don’t know VBA well enough to adapt it.
I guess I’m just looking for some ideas.

Anything helps,
Thanks-
Teak
 

Excel Facts

Convert text numbers to real numbers
Select a column containing text numbers. Press Alt+D E F to quickly convert text to numbers. Faster than "Convert to Number"
Can you test again , it is still working ?
I run and show only #V/A.
Please advise.
or someone can help.
Thanks
 
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