GeoPinPoint Blog
Practical examples of when and how each tool earns its keep.
Checking a delivery address before it goes out — Address → Coordinates
A small online shop gets an order for "Flat 3, 14 Alma Road, BS8" — no house-level detail, no full postcode. Before printing the shipping label, running it through Address → Coordinates confirms the geocoder resolves it to a specific, plottable point in Clifton, Bristol, rather than failing or guessing at a different Alma Road elsewhere in the country (there are several). The pin on the map is the actual sanity check: if it lands in the wrong city, that's caught before a courier does, not after.
Making sense of a GPS log — Coordinates → Address
A dashcam or fitness tracker export often gives you nothing but a stream of coordinates — 53.4808, -2.2426 and so on — with no place names attached. Pasting one of those pairs into Coordinates → Address turns it back into something readable: in this case, central Manchester. It's the same conversion emergency services rely on when a phone transmits a raw GPS fix rather than a typed address — turning a coordinate a machine understands into a place a person recognises.
Working out a realistic catchment area — Distance & Bearing
A shop deciding whether a new customer falls inside a "within 10 miles" delivery zone can put the store's address and the customer's address into Distance & Bearing and get a straight-line distance back in seconds — London to Reading comes back at roughly 40 miles, for instance. It's worth remembering this is the great-circle distance, not a driving distance, so it's best used as a quick first filter — genuinely borderline cases are worth double-checking against an actual route.
Geotagging a spreadsheet of shop locations — Batch Convert
A franchise with 60 branches has a spreadsheet with a name and an address for each site, but no coordinates — needed to plot them all on a map or work out territory overlaps. Copying the address column straight out of Excel into Batch Convert and running it once returns latitude and longitude for every branch, downloadable as a CSV that drops straight back into the same spreadsheet. What would be 60 individual lookups becomes one paste and one click.