Use the Map View Feature to Visualize Addresses in Your App

AppSheet provides several features to enhance how you see your data through mobile apps. One of the most used features is Map View. Let me show you how Map View works and how easy it is to visualize business data through a map in your mobile app.

Let’s say you have a list of businesses you regularly visit as a supplier in New York City. You maintain your key business data in an Google Sheet and would like to use the data while on the road. In this case, every time you visit a customer, you take a picture of the location and annotate the results of the visit.

You would probably have a spreadsheet like this:

Note: Yes, it is a rather basic view of a spreadsheet with business data that we are using for this example. AppSheet can work with several more columns and rows so the size of the sheet wouldn’t be an issue.

AppSheet will automatically identify the column as a list of addresses and will add a map to your app. Here’s a quick video showing how the app gets created from Google Sheets and how it automatically adds the Map View to your mobile app.

A few tips for adding your addresses:

• A column header called Address will help AppSheet identify the column more efficiently.
• Make sure you use complete information like city, state, and country.
• Map View connects to the Bing mapping system to find the best address match; if you include incomplete information, Map View will add its best guess of what the location is. A good reason to keep your data up to date!
• If you don’t want to have a Map View, you can turn it off from the UX Menu from within the AppSheet editor. You don’t need to modify your data- only tell AppSheet not to add the map.

If you have any questions about your app project with AppSheet, please join us at the AppSheet User Community on Google+ where members of the AppSheet team and other users will be happy to help you with your questions.

Keep on building!