I have been helping developers visualize their data on Bing Maps for many years. One of the most requests I’ve had in the past is, “I have this data, but can you show it on a map?” More often than not this data would be sitting in an Excel file, usually with some address data, but rarely contained any coordinate information. To get this data into Bing Maps I would geocode the address information and then convert the data into a format that could be easily imported into Bing Maps. This usually required a few hours of work on my part and usually led to a discussion on how this could be turned into a reusable business intelligence app.

The solution at the time was to create a custom add-in for Excel or export the data to a database and create a web app. In either case there was significant development work required. In the last few years a lot of great tools have been made available that solve this very problem. In this blog post I’m going to provide an overview of some of these tools along with details on how you can create your own tools as well…READ MORE