Two months ago, I forked an Excel Geocoding Tool, originally created by Juice Analytics. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to use Git, which I had never used before. Git works extremely well, and it’s now something that I wonder how I ever lived without. Github was a huge help in helping me understand how to setup Git, and I’ve since setup a few more projects there. Git can’t show changes to an excel file, so I exported the VBA modules, which allows for revision tracking of the code itself.

I haven’t worked in visual basic since high school, so it took some time to remember everything. My initial release fixed some long-standing issues with the tool and simplified the setup and usage. However, it still didn’t work on Mac, due to two issues: The RegEx and HTTP libraries aren’t available. I ended up rewriting the regex expressions with string functions that are definitely more confusing to understand, but work on both PC and Mac. The HTTP library was a bit more of a challenge, and I ended up using MacScript() to call cURL, which works beautifully.

Try the Excel Geocoding Tool out for yourself!