Format & input

How to prepare, format and export the data for distance calculation

Spreadsheet

You can use your favorite spreadsheet software like Google Docs, Microsoft Excel or Openoffice Calc to generate a spreadsheet routes you want to calculate. The spreadsheet should have the following format

Origin	Destination
your first origin	your first destination
your second origin	your second destination
...	...
your nth origin	your nth destination

The first row should be the header. If the header is missing, the calculation will fail or the first row will be lost in the result.

Every origin or every destination can be the same in every row. If you want to calculate distances between a single origin to different destinations (or vice versa) you should copy&paste that value to every field in a row.

Microsoft Excel

If Excel from Microsoft Office suite is your preferred spreadsheet software you can see a Microsoft Excel template here.

Input data

Origin and Destination can contain the following data

1. Country, city or region

2. Postal address

3. Postal codes (you need to specify the country code)

4. Coordinates (latitude, longitude)

5. IATA airport codes

6. what3words

To calculate the distance between your inputs we need to translate names into coordinates. This process is called geocoding. Read more about geocoding here:

Input data

Country, city or region

Due to availability of multiple results for the same input (such as Venice, Italy or Venice, Los Angeles) it is highly recommended to specify country and region of your input if available. Otherwise it is not guaranteed that the process hits the correct value.

Postal or Zip codes

If you want to calculate distances between postal or zip codes you need to specify the country code with its iso-3166-1 alpha-3 code.

Origin	Destination
Munich	10999,DEU
2000,AUS	Adelaide

Coordinates

To calculate distances between coordinates use latitude and longitude to define coordinates on the earth's surface. The format should be latitude,longitude.

Please make sure that there is no space between the values: latitude, longitude and that the correct order is kept longitude,latitude.

Origin	Destination
52,13	Bali,IND
Berlin	48.8583701,2.2922926

Export your data

If you're done with the data generation you need to export your spreadsheet to the XLSX or CSV format.

It is highly recommended to use XLSX format to export your data from spreadsheets.

Export to XLSX (Excel)

You should easily export or save your spreadsheet to the XLSX format. This format is supported from all major spreadsheet vendors.

Export to CSV

If you're done with the data generation you need to export your spreadsheet to the CSV format. You can see an example CSV file here.

You should use "," (comma) as the seperator and cast your fields with "

You should use utf-8 encoding otherwise a correct import of your data cannot be guaranteed.

If you're unsure if the final export is correct or you get errors while the analyzation process, please email the csv file to [e-mail] and I will review the input. That's free of charge 😀

Are you ready? Start here and upload your file:

Excel, XLS, CSV, XLSX Distance calculation