Free Geography Tools

5/2/2009: Doesn’t appear to be available anymore, but you can always check the MicroPath website. Otherwise, click on the “geocoding” category on the right for more options.

A few days ago, I covered the free gMapExplorer from Micropath, a stand-alone augmented Google Maps and Google Earth browser. Micropath has another useful stand-alone program called Geocode that can geocode an address (convert it to latitude/longitude), as well as reverse geocode (take a latitude/longitude position and find the nearest address). And you can do this either one address or coordinate set at a time, or in batch mode by creating a comma-separated value (CSV) file with the required data. Read the included PDF help file to make sure you put the data in the correct format, and also name the file correctly and put it into the program directory. The program comes with sample CSV files for both batch geocoding:

And reverse geocoding:

Output CSV files with this information are generated, and can be found in the program directory under a specified name. If you need to convert them to KML format, I’ve posted before about a program that can do that. Double-click on an address line to open your default browser and plot the address/position in Google Maps.

One oddity, at least in Windows Vista – every time you start up the program, the install program window comes up. But it doesn’t seem to affect the actual program startup time significantly, nor interfere with functionality.