Free and easy online map making!

Have you ever wanted a free online tool to create maps? Well want no more!

I've started to use batchgeo.com and it's great! You create a spreadsheet of locations offline (I use Google Sheets; Microsoft Excel also works), paste the spreadsheet contents into the box on the batchgeo.com homepage, click the Map Now button and, voila!, you've got yourself a pretty sweet map with your locations as pushpins overlaid on top of Google Maps.

The maps have other features:

• Locations can be categorized so that the pushpins are different colors.
• The maps can be embedded on other webpages, such as you see below.
• Users of the map can select which category of locations to display. When there are 26 or fewer locations displayed, the pushpins automatically get lettered from 'A' to 'Z' according to the order of locations in the spreadsheet.
• You can name the location differently than it appears in Google Maps.
• You can attach a URL to each location to provide further information.

For example, I made a map of the places I stayed during my 2014 road trip from Belleville, Ontario to Vancouver, British Columbia. I used different categories for each phase of my trip (Belleville to Prince Rupert, Grizzly Bear Tour, Prince Rupert to Vancouver, and Vancouver to Belleville). When only one category is selected, the locations are lettered in the order that I stayed at them. I attached links to park websites for the parks I stayed at.

Neato!

View Kyle's 2014 Road Trip in a full screen map