Google Fusion Table Map of Mound City Auctions Client Locations

You have a meeting scheduled with a big potential customer (in the auction world we usually refer to the seller as our customer and our buyers as our clients). You want to show this potential customer that your company has a farther reach than your competitors, and you wouldn’t mind throwing in a little razzle-dazzle for the wow factor. A Google Fusion Table is just what you need.

The first step is to produce a spread sheet with the addresses of the clients in it. Most of the time these type of records will come out of whatever software produces them in this type of format |123 StreetName | City | State | Zipcode | where the | symbol represents the cell edges in your spreadsheet. What Google wants for it’s fusion map is something more like what you would search for in Google Maps (like this) |123 StreetName City  State  Zipcode |

We will use Open Office Calc. for our spreadsheet in this example (if you do not own it you can download if for free here). Please note that there are wonderful forums for Open Office also on the link I posted and you can get help on almost anything you would ever want to do with a spreadsheet there.

1. Open your spreadsheet of data in open office then save it as a .csv file by using File-> Save As and choose Text CSV.
2. Open your saved .csv file
3. Save a copy of this file under a new name just in case something goes wrong (you can always delete it later if everything goes great.) Better safe than sorry.
4. Use this ”concatenate” formula as follows =CONCATENATE( A1; ” “; B1; ” “; C1).
5. Insert a new column into your spreadsheet by clicking on the letter on the top to select the entire column and right click and select Insert Columns.
6. Paste the concatenate formula into cell the top cell (where you want your address to be all put together) you will need the other data to be next to it. This example assumes your data is in Cells B1 and C1 but if it were in cells B1, C1, D1, E1 you would just modify it accordingly to =CONCATENATE( A1; ” “; B1; ” “; C1; ” “;D1). This will put a space between each part of the address.
7. Insert a new column next to this data.
8. Highlight your newly concatenated data by selecting all of the cells and copy it.
9. click on the first cell and select File –> Paste Special
10. In the Paste Special dialog box un-check formulas and check text.
11. Once you have copied your data into the new column you can delete all of the old data.
12. You might want to remove the house number from your spreadsheet to avoid exposing the exact address of you clients.  You can do this with a find and replace where you find a 1 and replace it with a space character, repeat this with 2, then 3, ….I’m looking for a more elegant solution for this and I’ll post it here when I get a few minutes to come up with a better fix.
13. You will need an Google account to do the rest of this so I’m going to assume you have already created one. If you have not go to Google and sign up.
14. Sign into your Google account and and select Google drive.
15. Click on the Create button and select More –> Table
16. Select the file you just created.
17. Select Visualize and Map.
18. Wait for the Map to generate.
19. Once the map generates you should change it to public by clicking on the Share button and selecting Public.
20. Click on the Get embeddable link button to get a link to put into an IM or your website.
21. Give my version a spin here.
22. Let me know if you had any problems getting a map or got stuck on this tutorial.