Lab 5 : Excel Coordinates and Geocoding

 This week we worked on on geocoding, specifically utilizing Microsoft Excel to  to build attribute tables for coordinates. While geocoding was something that I was aware of, I had never actually executed it in Arc Pro.

Initially I was a bit hesitant since Microsoft Excel was one of those programs, despite being very popular, that I never really used often. But I learned some interesting functions to help operate the program more proficiently, like having formulas that automatically calculate a combination of cells. 

(One of the Tables I made for an attribute table)

Probably the most interesting part of this week was the actual geocoding. We had to geocode a list of schools for Manatee County and optionally Sarasota County School district as well. 

By mere coincidence, I happen to actually work for Sarasota County Schools as a Planner and GIS Analyst! So I actually had access to some of the our own Geocoding of sites in our work system and I was able to help me geocode Manatee County. 

For the most part everything went smoothly. After the Data had been fully imported I did have a number of attributes that were unfortunately missing small details like Address numbers and X/Y coordinates, which caused 7 of my entries to not populate. While it wasn't terribly difficult to navigate the area and use Google Maps to figure out where everything is, I can definitely see this being problematic if you have say, 50+ entries that do not match.  One of the biggest take aways I got from this lab was to be extremely mindful of what you are loading into the Attributes, as it can save you some unneeded hassle the more addresses you have entered correctly. 

My Public map of the Manatee County Schools I geocoded