Some of the most valuable spatial data in any organisation isn’t in a GIS at all — it’s sitting in a spreadsheet. Customer addresses, asset registers, sensor locations, survey points, store lists: all of it is location data, but as long as it lives as rows and columns it can’t be mapped, measured or analysed spatially. The good news is that turning a spreadsheet into a map is usually a one-step conversion, as long as the data is set up correctly.
This guide covers how to get coordinate data out of Excel and CSV and into the formats mapping tools understand — KML for Google Earth, Shapefile and GeoJSON for GIS — and the free browser-based converters that do each job.
Get the columns right first
Every spreadsheet-to-map conversion depends on one thing: recognisable coordinate columns. A converter needs to find a pair of numbers per row that it can treat as a location. In practice that means columns named something like latitude / longitude, lat / lon, x / y, or easting / northing. If your coordinates are buried in a single “location” cell, or stored as addresses rather than numbers, you’ll need to split or geocode them before converting.
The second thing to know is which coordinate system your numbers are in. Latitude/longitude values (roughly -180 to 180) are WGS84 and map straight onto the globe. Eastings and northings in the hundreds of thousands are projected coordinates — a UTM zone, a national grid — and need that CRS specified so they end up in the right country rather than the middle of the ocean.
Excel to KML: put your rows on Google Earth
If the goal is simply to see the data — to hand a map to a colleague or drop points into Google Earth — KML is the easiest target. The Excel to KML converter reads every row with coordinates and writes a KML you can open in Google Earth or Google Maps, carrying all your other columns along as placemark attributes. Working from a CSV export instead of a native .xlsx? The CSV to KML converter does the same thing.
Excel and CSV to Shapefile or GeoJSON: bring it into GIS
When you need to do real spatial work — joins, buffers, spatial selection — the data has to become a proper GIS layer. Convert your spreadsheet to a Shapefile with the Excel to Shapefile converter, or, if you’re working in a web or open-source stack, to GeoJSON with the Excel to GeoJSON converter. From a CSV, the CSV to Shapefile converter is the equivalent.
Going the other way: map data back into a spreadsheet
The round trip matters too. When someone sends you a KML and you need the coordinates and attributes in a spreadsheet to sort, filter or report on, the KML to Excel converter extracts every placemark into rows and columns — point coordinates become latitude/longitude fields and each attribute becomes its own column.
A note for CAD and survey workflows
Survey and setting-out data often lives in exactly this kind of spreadsheet — point number, easting, northing, elevation — but the destination is a drawing rather than a map. In that case, the CSV to DXF converter writes AutoCAD-ready geometry instead of a mapping format.
All of it runs in your browser
Each of these converters processes the file locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded to a server, which is worth knowing when the spreadsheet contains customer or client data. Set your columns up cleanly, confirm the coordinate system, and a spreadsheet becomes a map in a single click.
