Calc: Using Internet Sites to Determine Driving Distances

users
#1

Highly technical issue:

I have a spreadsheet that, among other things, contains street addresses. I need to
determine the driving distance between pairs of addresses. From within Calc, how can I use
a site on the internet (i.e. Open Street Maps, Google Maps, MapQuest, etc.) to determine the
driving distance between two such street addresses? I suspect that I will need a user defined
function such as DRDIST(from, to) to accomplish this but I don't know how to go about
writing such a function.

With A1 containing the address 2345 Weldon and another address being hard coded as
4453 N Ashcroft I envision invoking this function as

  =DRDIST(A1&", Fresno, CA", "4453 N Ashcroft, Fresno, CA")

and the result, in miles, would be something like 5.2. (Both of these addresses where I lived
as a child no longer exist but I use them as examples of how the function would be invoked.)

It would be great if someone already has a function to accomplish this task and if it can be
shared with me. If that is not the case, then I will probably need a lot of assistance to create
such a function which can then be shared with the LO Calc community.

#2

If you already can access Google Maps, then you can use that directly to plan a route and find the driving distance,
also, I believe, estimated driving time. I'm not sure that Google would approve of this application without paying them
a royalty.

--doug

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
The people at Open Street Map might be quite "up for" helping with
something like this;
http://www.openstreetmap.org/

It might be worth contacting them to see if "multiple routes" might be
a functionality they want to build in as a feature, or they might
already have something that can do the jobn in order to test their
maps work.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: